Mastering GitHub Actions: How to use CodeQL for code security analysis | by Jack Roper | Jan, 2025

What is CodeQL?

In this article, we will look at CodeQL, explain what it is, why you would want to use it and provide a step-by-step guide on how to get started enabling it with your GitHub repositories. Learn how to secure your code better and detect vulnerabilities automatically! Let’s go!

CodeQL is a powerful code analysis engine developed by GitHub to automate security checks. It leverages a specialized query language to analyze codebases and identify potential vulnerabilities, bugs, and other code quality issues.

• Code Analysis Language: CodeQL is both a programming language and a toolchain for analyzing code. It allows you to write queries that can search for specific patterns or vulnerabilities in your code.
• Semantic Code Analysis: CodeQL treats code like data, enabling it to analyze code semantically and find potential vulnerabilities with greater accuracy than traditional static analyzers.
• Integration with GitHub: When used with GitHub, CodeQL can display the results of its analysis as code scanning alerts directly in your repository.
• Multi-Language Support: CodeQL supports a wide range of programming languages: ‘c-cpp’, ‘csharp’…