Phase 5: Rollout and scale code scanning

You can leverage the available APIs to rollout code scanning programmatically by team and by language across your enterprise using the repository data you collected earlier.

In this article

Note

This article is part of a series on adopting GitHub Advanced Security at scale. For the previous article in this series, see Phase 4: Create internal documentation.

Enabling code scanning

After piloting code scanning and creating internal documentation for best practices, you can enable code scanning across your company. You can configure code scanning default setup for all repositories in an organization from security overview. For more information, see Configuring default setup for code scanning at scale.

For some languages or build systems, you may need to instead configure advanced setup for code scanning to get full coverage of your codebase. However, advanced setup requires significantly more effort to configure, customize, and maintain, so we recommend enabling default setup first.

Building subject matter expertise

To successfully manage and use code scanning across your company, you should build internal subject matter expertise. For default setup for code scanning, one of the most important areas for subject matter experts (SMEs) to understand is interpreting and fixing code scanning alerts. For more information about code scanning alerts, see:

You'll also need SMEs if you need to use advanced setup for code scanning. These SMEs will need knowledge of code scanning alerts, as well as topics like GitHub Actions and customizing code scanning workflows for particular frameworks. For custom configurations of advanced setup, consider running meetings on complicated topics to scale the knowledge of several SMEs at once.

Note

For the next article in this series, see Phase 6: Rollout and scale secret scanning.