CodeQL query suites

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

Who can use this feature?

Code scanning is available for all public repositories on GitHub.com. To use code scanning in a private repository owned by an organization, you must have a license for GitHub Advanced Security. For more information, see "About GitHub Advanced Security."

In this article

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:

  • default query suite.
  • security-extended query suite. This suite is referred to as the "Extended" query suite on GitHub.

Currently, both the default query suite and the security-extended query suite are available for default setup for code scanning. Additionally, organization owners and security managers can recommend a query suite for use with default setup throughout their organization. For more information on configuring default setup for individual repositories, see "Configuring default setup for code scanning." For more information on configuring default setup at scale and recommending a query suite, see "Configuring default setup for code scanning at scale."

To use a custom query suite, you must configure advanced setup for CodeQL code scanning. For more information on advanced setups and creating a query suite, see "Configuring advanced setup for code scanning" 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 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 default setup for code scanning, and is referred to as the "Extended" query suite on GitHub.

Query lists for the default query suites

For each language, the following article lists which queries are included in the default and the security-extended suites. Where autofix is available for a language, details of which queries are supported are also included.

Further reading