The Snyk CLI is a command-line security scanner that detects known vulnerabilities across open-source dependencies, proprietary application code, container images, and infrastructure-as-code configuration files. It also serves as a platform management tool, allowing users to configure organizations, users, SSO, and reporting from the terminal rather than the web dashboard.
The CLI integrates directly into development workflows, enabling scanning within IDEs, build pipelines, and version control systems. It implements static analysis with interfile data flow analysis to find complex security flaws in source code, and it supports a reverse-connect broker proxy for securely scanning private Git repositories and package registries without exposing internal networks. The tool can gate CI/CD pipelines by failing builds when scan results violate configurable policy rules on severity, risk score, or license type.
Beyond scanning, the CLI manages vulnerability remediation workflows, including automated fix pull requests, continuous dependency monitoring, risk-based prioritization, and multi-format report generation (HTML, JSON, SARIF). It can produce software bills of materials from project manifests and test them against known vulnerabilities. The scanner covers a wide range of language ecosystems, from JavaScript and Python to Go, Rust, .NET, and many others, with language-specific plugins loaded at runtime for accurate dependency resolution and code analysis.
