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CodeQL code scanning launches Kotlin analysis support (beta)

Starting today, GitHub code scanning includes beta support for analyzing code written in Kotlin, powered by the CodeQL engine.

Kotlin is a key programming language used in the creation of Android mobile applications, and is an increasingly popular choice for new projects, augmenting or even replacing Java. To help organisations and open source developers find potential vulnerabilities in their code, we’ve added Kotlin support (beta) to the CodeQL engine that powers GitHub code scanning. CodeQL now natively supports Kotlin, as well as mixed Java and Kotlin projects. Set up code scanning on your repositories today to receive actionable security alerts right on your pull-requests. To enable Kotlin analysis on a repository, configure the code scanning workflow languages to include java. If you have any feedback or questions, please use this discussion thread or open an issue if you encounter any problems.

Kotlin support is an extension of our existing Java support, and benefits from all of our existing CodeQL queries for Java, for both mobile and server-side applications. We’ve also improved and added a range of mobile-specific queries, covering issues such as handling of Intents, Webview validation problems, fragment injection and more.

CodeQL support for Kotlin has already been used to identify novel real-world vulnerabilities in popular apps, from task management to productivity platforms. You can watch the GitHub Universe talk on how CodeQL was used to identify vulnerabilities like these here.

Kotlin beta support is available by default in GitHub.com code scanning, the CodeQL CLI, and the CodeQL extension for VS Code. GitHub Enterprise Server (GHES) version 3.8 will include this beta release.

You can now filter results from the code scanning REST API based on alert severity. Use the parameter severity to return only code scanning alerts with a specific severity. This is available at the repository and organization level.

This feature is available on GitHub.com, and will also be included in GitHub Enterprise Server (GHES) version 3.8.

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In a small but frequently requested improvement, GitHub now shows the date that an archived repository was put into read-only mode to indicate it is no longer actively maintained.

Previously, you could see that a repo was in the 'archived' state and probably infer from the commit log when it last saw activity, but the actual date the archiving happened was not surfaced anywhere. Now there's a date included in the "this repo is read-only" banner at the top of the repository view.

New repository banner showing an archived repository and the date on which it was archived

Repositories archived prior to November 9th, 2022, will display a more generic message.

Repository banner showing the generic message that it was archived prior to November 9th, 2022

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