QL analysis support for CodeQL

• Part of the May 2021 code scanning hackathon.
• Part of the October 2021 code scanning hackathon.

Under development.

Viewing the alerts from github/codeql and github/codeql-go

TLDR: View https://github.com/github/codeql-ql/security/code-scanning?query=branch%3Anightly-changes-alerts periodically.

The nightly-changes-alerts branch contains nightly snapshots of QL related code from github/codeql and github/codeql-go. The corresponding code-scanning alerts are from the default query suite.

The branch and alerts are updated every night by the nightly-changes.yml workflow.

Ideally, the scans would happen automatically as part of the PRs. That requires more coordination, and is tracked here: https://github.com/github/codeql-coreql-team/issues/1669.

Building the tools from source

Install Rust (if using VSCode, you may also want the rust-analyzer extension), then run:

cargo build --release

Generating the database schema and QL library

The generated ql/src/ql.dbscheme and ql/src/codeql_ql/ast/internal/TreeSitter.qll files are included in the repository, but they can be re-generated as follows:

./create-extractor-pack.sh

Building a CodeQL database for a QL program

First, get an extractor pack:

Run ./create-extractor-pack.sh (Linux/Mac) or .\create-extractor-pack.ps1 (Windows PowerShell) and the pack will be created in the extractor-pack directory.

Then run

codeql database create <database-path> -l ql -s <project-source-path> --search-path <extractor-pack-path>

Running qltests

Run

codeql test run <test-path> --search-path <repository-root-path>

GitHub Actions

In addition to the above nightly scans of the known CodeQL repositories, the following Actions are of particular interest:

• bleeding-codeql-analysis.yml
  • runs on all PRs, displays how alerts for the known CodeQL repositories change as consequence of the PR
  • the code from the known CodeQL repositories should be updated occasionally by running repo-tests/import-repositories.sh locally, and creating a PR.
  • produces an artifact built ql database in
• build.yml
  • produces an artifact with the ql extractor and the ql query pack in