The Local PHP Security Checker is a command line tool that checks if your PHP application depends on PHP packages with known security vulnerabilities. It uses the Security Advisories Database behind the scenes.
Download a binary from the Releases page on Github, rename it to
local-php-security-checker and make it executable.
From a directory containing a PHP project that uses Composer, check for known vulnerabilities by running the binary without arguments or flags:
$ local-php-security-checker
You can also pass a --path to check a specific directory:
$ local-php-security-checker --path=/path/to/php/project
$ local-php-security-checker --path=/path/to/php/project/composer.lock
By default, the output is optimized for terminals, change it via the --format
flag (supported formats: ansi, markdown, json, junit, and yaml):
$ local-php-security-checker --format=json
All packages are checked for security vulnerabilities by default. You can skip the checks for packages listed in require-dev by passing the no-dev flag:
$ local-php-security-checker --no-dev
When running the command, it checks for an updated vulnerability database and
downloads it from Github if it changed since the last run. If you want to avoid
the HTTP round-trip, use --local. To force a database update without checking
for a project, use --update-cache.
If you want to continuously check for security issues on your applications in production, you can use this tool in combination with croncape to get an email whenever a new security issue is detected:
MAILTO=sysadmins@example.com
50 23 * * * croncape php-security-checker --path=/path/to/php/project