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

This tool returns the following codes