How often will the code scanning analysis run?

By default, code scanning will trigger a scan with the CodeQL engine on the following events:

• On every pull request — to flag up potential security problems for you to investigate before merging a PR.
• On every push to your default branch and other protected branches — this keeps the analysis results on your repository’s Security tab up to date.
• Once a week at a fixed time — to make sure you benefit from the latest updated security analysis even when no code was committed or PRs were opened.

What will this cost?

Nothing! The CodeQL engine will run inside GitHub Actions, making use of your unlimited free compute minutes for public repositories.

Where can I see the results of the analysis?

The results of the analysis will be available on the Security tab of your repository. You can find more information about the results here.

For Pull Requests, you can find the results of the analysis in the Checks tab. You can find more information about the Pull Request results here.

What types of problems does CodeQL find?

CodeQL queries are hosted in the github/codeql repository.

By default, code scanning runs the default query suite. The queries in the default query suite are highly precise and return few false positive code scanning results.

If you are looking for a more comprehensive analysis, which could return a greater number of false positives, you can enable the security-extended query suite in the queries option of github/codeql-action/init.

In the event of finding a false positive, please create a false positive Issue in github/codeql so we can investigate and improve the query in question. You can also contribute to the query by opening a pull request against github/codeql.

How do I customize the analysis?

You can customize the analysis by using a CodeQL configuration file. This way, you can specify which queries should [not] be run, and/or which files should be excluded from the analysis. You can find more information about the configuration file here.

How do I upgrade my CodeQL engine?

No need! New versions of the CodeQL analysis are constantly deployed on GitHub.com; your repository will automatically benefit from the most recently released version.

The analysis doesn’t seem to be working

If you get an error in GitHub Actions that indicates that CodeQL wasn’t able to analyze your code, please follow the instructions here to debug the analysis.

Which source code hosting platforms does code scanning support?

GitHub code scanning is deeply integrated within GitHub itself. If you’d like to scan source code that is hosted elsewhere, we suggest that you create a mirror of that code on GitHub.