Unlocking the Power of Automated Code Scanning with semgrep: Safeguard Your Software Today!

⚗ Kevin Summersill 🔋
2 min readFeb 13, 2023

In today’s increasingly digital and interconnected world, software security is more important than ever. Manual code reviews are often time consuming and labor intensive, and automated scanning tools can help. One such tool is Semgrep, an open-source static analysis engine designed to identify potential security and bug-related issues in code.

Semgrep works by “greping” through code, searching for specific patterns and structure, and flagging any issues it finds. It is particularly useful for identifying common security flaws such as SQL injection and Cross-Site Scripting. It can also be used to automate a large portion of the code review process, especially for web applications.

Using Semgrep to scan code is straightforward and simple. First, you’ll need to install the Semgrep CLI tool, which is available for both Linux and macOS. After installation, all you need to do is run the following command from your project’s root directory:

$ semgrep --config ./semgrep-config.yml .

This will run the Semgrep engine on all the code in the current directory, and display a list of any potential issues it finds. The best part is that Semgrep is highly customizable, allowing you to adjust the severity of reported issues or…

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⚗ Kevin Summersill 🔋

Enterprise Solution Architect | Certified K8s Administrator/Developer ⚓ | SAFe SPC | Cert Terraform | AWS Solutions Architect | Dev*Ops/GitOps Engineer 🔥