CodeQL documentation

CodeQL tools

GitHub provides the CodeQL command-line interface and CodeQL for Visual Studio Code for performing CodeQL analysis on open source codebases.

CodeQL command-line interface

The CodeQL command-line interface (CLI) is primarily used to create databases for security research. You can also query CodeQL databases directly from the command line or using the Visual Studio Code extension. The CodeQL CLI can be downloaded from GitHub releases. For more information, see “CodeQL CLI” and the CLI changelog.

CodeQL packs

The standard CodeQL query and library packs (source) maintained by GitHub are:

For more information, see “About CodeQL packs.”

CodeQL bundle

The CodeQL bundle consists of the CodeQL CLI together with the standard CodeQL query and library packs maintained by GitHub. The bundle can be downloaded from GitHub releases. Use this when running code scanning with CodeQL on GitHub Actions or in another CI system.

CodeQL for Visual Studio Code

You can analyze CodeQL databases in Visual Studio Code using the CodeQL extension, which provides an enhanced environment for writing and running custom queries and viewing the results. For more information, see “CodeQL for Visual Studio Code.”

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