nuclei

Nuclei is a command-line vulnerability scanner that runs detection logic defined in YAML templates. Each template describes the requests to send and the conditions that confirm a vulnerability, so scans can mimic real-world verification steps rather than rely on simple banner matching. Templates are contributed by a community of security professionals and cover trending vulnerabilities across applications, APIs, networks, DNS and cloud configurations.

Targets are passed with -u or a list file with -l, and templates are selected with -t, -w (workflows), or -turl (remote URLs). Input can be a plain list or other formats such as Burp, JSONL, YAML, OpenAPI and Swagger (-im). Other documented flags include -nt to run only templates from the latest nuclei-templates release, -as for automatic scans that map Wappalyzer technology detection to template tags, -validate to check templates, -sign to sign them, and -resume to continue a saved scan. Protocols supported include TCP, DNS, HTTP, SSL, WHOIS, JavaScript and Code. There are also an -ai flag that generates and runs a template from a prompt, and -llm options for semantic matching with providers such as OpenAI or Ollama.

It supports parallel scan processing and request clustering, and can be integrated into CI/CD pipelines for vulnerability detection and regression testing. Findings can be sent to Jira, Splunk, GitHub, Elastic and GitLab. The README notes it is built primarily as a standalone CLI, that running it as a service may carry security risks, and that releases can contain breaking changes. Typical users are pentesters, security engineers and bug bounty researchers. A cloud tier and Pro/Enterprise editions exist for storing results and scanning at scale.

Installation

# via Go
go install -v github.com/projectdiscovery/nuclei/v3/cmd/nuclei@latest