nuclei

Nuclei is a modern, high-performance vulnerability scanner that leverages simple YAML-based templates. It empowers you to design custom vulnerability detection scenarios that mimic real-world conditions, leading to zero false positives.

• Simple YAML format for creating and customizing vulnerability templates.
• Contributed by thousands of security professionals to tackle trending vulnerabilities.
• Reduce false positives by simulating real-world steps to verify a vulnerability.
• Ultra-fast parallel scan processing and request clustering.
• Integrate into CI/CD pipelines for vulnerability detection and regression testing.
• Supports multiple protocols like TCP, DNS, HTTP, SSL, WHOIS, JavaScript, Code and more.
• Integrate with Jira, Splunk, GitHub, Elastic, GitLab.

Table of Contents

• Get Started
  • 1. Nuclei CLI
  • 2. Pro and Enterprise Editions
• Documentation
  • Command Line Flags
  • Single target scan
  • Scanning multiple targets
  • Network scan
  • Scanning with your custom template
  • Connect Nuclei to ProjectDiscovery_
• Nuclei Templates, Community and Rewards 💎
• Our Mission
• Contributors ❤
• License

Get Started

1. Nuclei CLI

Install Nuclei on your machine. Get started by following the installation guide here. Additionally, we provide a free cloud tier that comes with generous monthly free limits:

• Store and visualize your vulnerability findings
• Write and manage your Nuclei templates
• Access the latest Nuclei templates
• Discover and store your targets

[!Important]

This project is in active development. Expect breaking changes with releases. Review the release changelog before updating.
This project is primarily built to be used as a standalone CLI tool. Running nuclei as a service may pose security risks. It's recommended to use with caution and additional security measures.

2. Pro and Enterprise Editions

For security teams and enterprises, we provide a cloud-hosted service built on top of Nuclei OSS, fine-tuned to help you continuously run vulnerability scans at scale with your team and existing workflows:

• 50x faster scans
• Large scale scanning with high accuracy
• Integrations with cloud services (AWS, GCP, Azure, Cloudflare, Fastly, Terraform, Kubernetes)
• Jira, Slack, Linear, APIs and Webhooks
• Executive and compliance reporting
• Plus: Real-time scanning, SAML SSO, SOC 2 compliant platform (with EU and US hosting options), shared team workspaces, and more
• We're constantly adding new features!
• Ideal for: Pentesters, security teams, and enterprises

Sign up to Pro or Talk to our team if you have a large organization and complex requirements.

Documentation

Browse the full Nuclei documentation here. If you’re new to Nuclei, check out our foundational YouTube series.

Installation

nuclei requires go >= 1.24.2 to install successfully. Run the following command to get the repo:

go install -v github.com/projectdiscovery/nuclei/v3/cmd/nuclei@latest

To learn more about installing nuclei, see https://docs.projectdiscovery.io/tools/nuclei/install.

Command Line Flags

To display all the flags for the tool:

nuclei -h

…

Additional documentation is available at: docs.projectdiscovery.io/getting-started/running

Single target scan

To perform a quick scan on web-application:

nuclei -target https://example.com

Scanning multiple targets

Nuclei can handle bulk scanning by providing a list of targets. You can use a file containing multiple URLs.

nuclei -list urls.txt

Network scan

This will scan the entire subnet for network-related issues, such as open ports or misconfigured services.

nuclei -target 192.168.1.0/24

Scanning with your custom template

To write and use your own template, create a .yaml file with specific rules, then use it as follows.

nuclei -u https://example.com -t /path/to/your-template.yaml

Connect Nuclei to ProjectDiscovery

You can run the scans on your machine and upload the results to the cloud platform for further analysis and remediation.

nuclei -target https://example.com -dashboard

[!NOTE] This feature is absolutely free and does not require any subscription. For a detailed guide, refer to the documentation.

Nuclei Templates, Community and Rewards 💎

Nuclei templates are based on the concepts of YAML based template files that define how the requests will be sent and processed. This allows easy extensibility capabilities to nuclei. The templates are written in YAML which specifies a simple human-readable format to quickly define the execution process.

Try it online with our free AI powered Nuclei Templates Editor by clicking here.

Nuclei Templates offer a streamlined way to identify and communicate vulnerabilities, combining essential details like severity ratings and detection methods. This open-source, community-developed tool accelerates threat response and is widely recognized in the cybersecurity world. Nuclei templates are actively contributed by thousands of security researchers globally. We run two programs for our contributors: Pioneers and 💎 bounties.

Examples

Visit our documentation for use cases and ideas.

Our Mission

Traditional vulnerability scanners were built decades ago. They are closed-source, incredibly slow, and vendor-driven. Today's attackers are mass exploiting newly released CVEs across the internet within days, unlike the years it used to take. This shift requires a completely different approach to tackling trending exploits on the internet.

We built Nuclei to solve this challenge. We made the entire scanning engine framework open and customizable—allowing the global security community to collaborate and tackle the trending attack vectors and vulnerabilities on the internet. Nuclei is now used and contributed by Fortune 500 enterprises, government agencies, universities.

You can participate by contributing to our code, templates library, or joining our team.

Contributors :heart:

Thanks to all the amazing community contributors for sending PRs and keeping this project updated. :heart: