Nuclei is a fast tool for configurable targeted scanning based on templates offering massive extensibility and ease of use.
Nuclei is used to send requests across targets based on a template leading to zero false positives and providing effective scanning for known paths. Main use cases for nuclei are during initial reconnaissance phase to quickly check for low hanging fruits or CVEs across targets that are known and easily detectable. It uses retryablehttp-go library designed to handle various errors and retries in case of blocking by WAFs, this is also one of our core modules from custom-queries.
We have also open-sourced a template repository to maintain various type of templates, we hope that you will contribute there too. Templates are provided in hopes that these will be useful and will allow everyone to build their own templates for the scanner. Checkout the templating guide at nuclei.projectdiscovery.io for a primer on nuclei templates.
- Simple and modular code base making it easy to contribute.
- Fast And fully configurable using a template based engine.
- Handles edge cases doing retries, backoffs etc for handling WAFs.
- Smart matching functionality for zero false positive scanning.
nuclei -hThis will display help for the tool. Here are all the switches it supports.
| Flag | Description | Example |
|---|---|---|
| -c | Number of concurrent requests (default 10) | nuclei -c 100 |
| -l | List of urls to run templates | nuclei -l urls.txt |
| -target | Target to scan using templates | nuclei -target hxxps://example.com |
| -t | Templates input file/files to check across hosts | nuclei -t git-core.yaml |
| -t | Templates input file/files to check across hosts | nuclei -t nuclei-templates/cves/ |
| -nC | Don't Use colors in output | nuclei -nC |
| -json | Prints and write output in json format | nuclei -json |
| -json-requests | Write requests/responses for matches in JSON output | nuclei -json -json-requests |
| -o | File to save output result (optional) | nuclei -o output.txt |
| -pbar | Enable the progress bar (optional) | nuclei -pbar |
| -silent | Show only found results in output | nuclei -silent |
| (except when using with pbar) | ||
| -retries | Number of times to retry a failed request (default 1) | nuclei -retries 1 |
| -timeout | Seconds to wait before timeout (default 5) | nuclei -timeout 5 |
| -rl | Rate-Limit of requests per specified target | nuclei -rl 100 |
| -severity | Run templates based on severity | nuclei -severity critical, low |
| -exclude | Template input dir/file/files to exclude | nuclei -exclude panels -exclude tokens |
| -debug | Allow debugging of request/responses. | nuclei -debug |
| -update-templates | Download and updates nuclei templates | nuclei -update-templates |
| -update-directory | Directory for storing nuclei-templates(optional) | nuclei -update-directory templates |
| -tl | List available templates | nuclei -tl |
| -v | Shows verbose output of all sent requests | nuclei -v |
| -version | Show version of nuclei | nuclei -version |
| -proxy-url | Proxy URL | nuclei -proxy-url hxxp://127.0.0.1:8080 |
| -proxy-socks-url | Socks proxy URL | nuclei -proxy-socks-url socks5://127.0.0.1:8080 |
| -H | Custom Header | nuclei -H "x-bug-bounty: hacker" |
The installation is easy. You can download the pre-built binaries for your platform from the Releases page. Extract them using tar, move it to your $PATHand you're ready to go.
Download latest binary from https://github.com/projectdiscovery/nuclei/releases
▶ tar -xzvf nuclei-linux-amd64.tar.gz
▶ mv nuclei /usr/local/bin/
▶ nuclei -versionnuclei requires go1.14+ to install successfully. Run the following command to get the repo -
▶ GO111MODULE=on go get -u -v github.com/projectdiscovery/nuclei/v2/cmd/nuclei▶ git clone https://github.com/projectdiscovery/nuclei.git; cd nuclei/v2/cmd/nuclei/; go build; mv nuclei /usr/local/bin/; nuclei -versionYou can download or update the nuclei templates using update-templates flag.
▶ nuclei -update-templatesor download it from nuclei templates Github project.
▶ git clone https://github.com/projectdiscovery/nuclei-templates.gitPlease refer to nuclei templating guide to writing your own custom templates.
This will run git-core.yaml template against all the hosts in urls.txt and returns the matched results.
▶ nuclei -l urls.txt -t files/git-core.yaml -o results.txtYou can also pass the list of urls at standard input (STDIN). This allows for easy integration in automation pipelines.
▶ cat urls.txt | nuclei -t files/git-core.yaml -o results.txt💡 Nuclei accepts list of URLs as input, for example here is how urls.txt looks like:-
https://test.some-site.com
http://vuls-testing.com
https://test.com
This will run the tool against all the urls in urls.txt with all the templates in the cves and files directory and returns the matched results.
▶ nuclei -l urls.txt -t cves/ -t files/ -o results.txt▶ subfinder -d hackerone.com -silent | httpx -silent | nuclei -t cves/ -o results.txtYou can use the nuclei dockerhub image. Simply run -
▶ docker pull projectdiscovery/nucleiAfter downloading or building the container, run the following:
▶ docker run -it projectdiscovery/nucleiFor example, this will run the tool against all the hosts in urls.txt and output the results to your host file system:
▶ cat urls.txt | docker run -v /path/to/nuclei-templates:/app/nuclei-templates -v /path/to/nuclei/config:/app/.nuclei-config.json -i projectdiscovery/nuclei -t ./files/git-config.yaml > results.txtRemember to change /path-to-nuclei-templates to the real path on your host file system.
Nuclei-templates includes multiple checks including many that are useful for attack surface mapping and not necessarily a security issue, in cases where you only looking to scan few specific templates or directory, here are few options / flags to filter or exclude them from running.
You can run the templates based on the specific severity of the template, single and multiple severity can be used for scan.
nuclei -l urls.txt -t cves/ -severity critical, mediumThe above example will run all the templates under cves directory with critical and medium severity.
nuclei -l urls.txt -t panels/ -t technologies -severity infoThe above example will run all the templates under panels and technologies directory with severity marked as info
We do not suggest running all the nuclei-templates directory at once, in case of doing so, one can make use of exclude flag to exclude specific directory or templates to ignore from scanning.
nuclei -l urls.txt -t nuclei-templates -exclude panels/ -exclude technologies -exclude files/wp-xmlrpc.yamlNote:- both directory and specific templates case be excluded from scan as shared in the above example.
Since release of nuclei v2.1.1, we have added support of .nuclei-ignore file that works along with update-templates flag of nuclei, in .nuclei-ignore file, you can define all the template directory or template path that you wanted to exclude from all the nuclei scans, to start using this feature, make sure you installed nuclei templates using nuclei -update-templates flag, now you can add/update/remove templates in the file that you wanted to exclude from running.
nano ~/nuclei-templates/.nuclei-ignore
Default nuclei-ignore list can be accessed from here, in case you don't want to exclude anything, simply remove the .nuclei-ignore file.
- Progress bar is experimental feature, might not work in few cases.
- Progress bar doesn't work with workflows, numbers are not accurate due to conditional execution.
nuclei is made with 🖤 by the projectdiscovery team. Community contributions have made the project what it is. See the Thanks.md file for more details.
Do also check out these similar awesome projects that may fit in your workflow:
Burp Suite, FFuF, Jaeles, Qsfuzz, Inception, Snallygaster, Gofingerprint, Sn1per, Google tsunami, ChopChop