You can write your own CodeQL queries to find specific vulnerabilities and errors.
This article is specifically about writing queries to use with the database analyze command to produce interpreted results. For conceptual information about custom queries, see Custom CodeQL queries.
Before running a custom analysis you need to write a valid query, and save it in a file with a .ql extension. There is extensive documentation available to help you write queries. For more information, see CodeQL queries.
When running queries with the database analyze command, you must include the following two properties to ensure that the results are interpreted correctly:
Query identifier (@id): a sequence of words composed of lowercase letters or digits, delimited by / or -, identifying and classifying the query.
Query type (@kind): identifies the query as a simple alert (@kind problem), an alert documented by a sequence of code locations (@kind path-problem), for extractor troubleshooting (@kind diagnostic), or a summary metric (@kind metric and @tags summary).
For more information about these metadata properties, see Metadata for CodeQL queries and the Query metadata style guide.
For information about query help and documentation formats, see Custom CodeQL queries.
To include query help in SARIF files when running code scanning analyses:
Write your query help in one of the following formats:
my-query.md for my-query.ql).qhelp file: Write query help in .qhelp format, then convert it to Markdown before running the analysis. For more information, see Query help files and Testing query help files.Run codeql database analyze with the --sarif-add-query-help option:
codeql database analyze <database> --format=sarif-latest --output=results.sarif --sarif-add-query-help
Note
The --sarif-add-query-help option is available from CodeQL CLI v2.7.1 onwards.
Upload the SARIF file to GitHub.
To share and use your custom queries, see Publishing and using CodeQL packs.