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Built-in CodeQL query suites

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You can choose from different built-in CodeQL query suites to use in your CodeQL code scanning setup.

Code scanning is available for all public repositories on GitHub.com. Code scanning is also available for private repositories owned by organizations that use GitHub Enterprise Cloud and have a license for GitHub Advanced Security. For more information, see "About GitHub Advanced Security."

About CodeQL query suites

With CodeQL code scanning, you can select a specific group of CodeQL queries, called a CodeQL query suite, to run against your code. The following built-in query suites are available through GitHub:

  • the default query suite.
  • the security-extended query suite.

Currently, both the default query suite and the security-extended query suite are available for the default setup for code scanning. For more information on the default setup, see "Configuring code scanning for a repository."

To use a custom query suite, you must create an advanced setup for CodeQL code scanning. For more information on advanced setups and creating a query suite, see "Configuring code scanning for a repository" and "Creating CodeQL query suites."

Built-in CodeQL query suites

The built-in CodeQL query suites, default and security-extended, are created and maintained by GitHub. Both of these query suites are available for every CodeQL-supported language. For more information on CodeQL-supported languages, see "About code scanning with CodeQL."

default query suite

  • The default query suite is the group of queries run by default in CodeQL code scanning on GitHub.
  • The queries in the default query suite are highly precise and return few false positive code scanning results. Relative to the security-extended query suite, the default suite returns fewer low-confidence code scanning results.
  • This query suite is available for use with the default setup for code scanning.

security-extended query suite

  • The security-extended query suite consists of all the queries in the default query suite, plus additional queries with slightly lower precision and severity.
  • Relative to the default query suite, the security-extended suite may return a greater number of false positive code scanning results.
  • This query suite is available for use with the default setup for code scanning.

Further reading