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This version of GitHub Enterprise was discontinued on 2022-06-03. No patch releases will be made, even for critical security issues. For better performance, improved security, and new features, upgrade to the latest version of GitHub Enterprise. For help with the upgrade, contact GitHub Enterprise support.

About code scanning with CodeQL

You can use CodeQL to identify vulnerabilities and errors in your code. The results are shown as code scanning alerts in GitHub.

Code scanning is available for organization-owned repositories where GitHub Advanced Security is enabled. For more information, see "About GitHub Advanced Security."

Note: Your site administrator must enable code scanning for your GitHub Enterprise Server instance before you can use this feature. For more information, see "Configuring code scanning for your appliance."

About code scanning with CodeQL

CodeQL is the code analysis engine developed by GitHub to automate security checks. You can analyze your code using CodeQL and display the results as code scanning alerts.

There are two main ways to use CodeQL analysis for code scanning:

About CodeQL

CodeQL treats code like data, allowing you to find potential vulnerabilities in your code with greater confidence than traditional static analyzers.

  1. You generate a CodeQL database to represent your codebase.
  2. Then you run CodeQL queries on that database to identify problems in the codebase.
  3. The query results are shown as code scanning alerts in GitHub Enterprise Server when you use CodeQL with code scanning.

CodeQL supports both compiled and interpreted languages, and can find vulnerabilities and errors in code that's written in the supported languages.

  • C/C++
  • C#
  • Go
  • Java
  • JavaScript/TypeScript
  • Python

About CodeQL queries

GitHub experts, security researchers, and community contributors write and maintain the default CodeQL queries used for code scanning. The queries are regularly updated to improve analysis and reduce any false positive results. The queries are open source, so you can view and contribute to the queries in the github/codeql repository. For more information, see CodeQL on the CodeQL website. You can also write your own queries. For more information, see "About CodeQL queries" in the CodeQL documentation.

You can run additional queries as part of your code scanning analysis. The queries you want to run must belong to a QL pack in a repository. Queries must only depend on the standard libraries (that is, the libraries referenced by an import LANGUAGE statement in your query), or libraries in the same QL pack as the query. For more information, see "About QL packs."