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About code scanning

In this article

You can use code scanning to find security vulnerabilities and errors in the code for your project on GitHub.

Code scanning is available for all public repositories, and for private repositories owned by organizations where GitHub Advanced Security is enabled. For more information, see "About GitHub Advanced Security."

About code scanning

Code scanning is a feature that you use to analyze the code in a GitHub repository to find security vulnerabilities and coding errors. Any problems identified by the analysis are shown in GitHub.

You can use code scanning to find, triage, and prioritize fixes for existing problems in your code. Code scanning also prevents developers from introducing new problems. You can schedule scans for specific days and times, or trigger scans when a specific event occurs in the repository, such as a push.

If code scanning finds a potential vulnerability or error in your code, GitHub displays an alert in the repository. After you fix the code that triggered the alert, GitHub closes the alert. For more information, see "Managing code scanning alerts for your repository."

To monitor results from code scanning across your repositories or your organization, you can use webhooks and the code scanning API. For information about the webhooks for code scanning, see "Webhook events and payloads." For information about API endpoints, see "Code scanning."

To get started with code scanning, see "Setting up code scanning for a repository."

About billing for code scanning

Code scanning uses GitHub Actions, and each run of a code scanning workflow consumes minutes for GitHub Actions. For more information, see "About billing for GitHub Actions."

About tools for code scanning

You can set up code scanning to use the CodeQL product maintained by GitHub or a third-party code scanning tool.

About CodeQL analysis

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. For more information about CodeQL, see "About code scanning with CodeQL."

About third-party code scanning tools

Code scanning is interoperable with third-party code scanning tools that output Static Analysis Results Interchange Format (SARIF) data. SARIF is an open standard. For more information, see "SARIF output for code scanning."

You can run third-party analysis tools within GitHub using actions or within an external CI system. For more information, see "Setting up code scanning for a repository" or "Uploading a SARIF file to GitHub."