Templates FAQ

What are nuclei templates?

Nuclei templates are the core of the nuclei project. The template contains the actual logic to execute for detecting various vulnerabilities and checks, template projects consist 880+ ready-to-use community-contributed vulnerability templates.

How to write nuclei templates?

We maintain a documentation guide for writing new and custom nuclei templates. We also have sample templates for various module nuclei support.

Is writing nuclei templates useful?

Performing security assessment of the application is time-consuming. Its always better and a time-saver to automate the steps, whenever possible. Once you've found a security vulnerability, you can prepare a nuclei template by defining the required HTTP request to reproduce the issue and test the same vulnerability across multiple hosts with ease. Worth mentioning you write the template once and use it forever, as you don't need to manually test that specific vulnerability anymore.

Here are few examples from the community making use of templates to automate the security findings.

Reference

• https://dhiyaneshgeek.github.io/web/security/2021/02/19/exploiting-out-of-band-xxe/
• https://blog.melbadry9.xyz/fuzzing/nuclei-cache-poisoning
• https://blog.melbadry9.xyz/dangling-dns/xyz-services/ddns-worksites
• https://blog.melbadry9.xyz/dangling-dns/aws/ddns-ec2-current-state
• https://blog.projectdiscovery.io/writing-nuclei-templates-for-wordpress-cves/

How to run nuclei templates?

Nuclei templates can be executed using template name or tags, using -t, -tags flag, respectively.

nuclei -tags cve -list target_urls.txt

I want to contribute nuclei templates 😁

You are always welcome to share your nuclei template with the community. You can either open GitHub issue with template details or open a Github pull request with your nuclei templates. If you don't have a GitHub account, you can also make use of discord server to share the template with us and we will make sure to add them to the project asap.

I'm getting false-positive results!

Nuclei templates is a community-contributed project. We try our best to manually review them before merging them into the template project. Still, there is a possibility that some templates with weak matchers will slip through the manual verification. This will produce false-positive results. Templates are only as good as their matchers.

If you identified templates producing false positive/negative results, here are few steps that you can follow to fix the templates quickly.

I found a template producing false +ve/-ve result but I'm not sure if this is accurate.

DM us on twitter or discord server to confirm the validity of the template.

I found a template producing false +ve/-ve result and I don't know how to fix it.

Please open a GitHub issue with details, and we will quickly address the problem and update the template.

I found a template producing a false +ve/-ve result and I know how to fix it.

Please open a GitHub pull request with fix.

I'm not able to run all templates!

Nuclei follows the default list of templates that are excluded from default run and are listed here, This is to ensure that no one runs any templates that are not meant to run along with all templates. We also want to make sure that no one is excluded from running safe scans. We do not suggest that you run them unless you are running them for a specific use.

Templates exist on GitHub but not running with nuclei?

When you download or update nuclei templates using nuclei binary, it downloads all the templates from the latest release. All templates added after the release exist in the master branch and are added to nuclei when a new template release is created.