Skipping Files and Directories

This section details ways to specify the files and directories that Trivy should not scan.

Skip Files

Scanner	Supported
Vulnerability	✓
Misconfiguration	✓
Secret	✓
License	✓

By default, Trivy traverses directories and searches for all necessary files for scanning. You can skip files that you don't maintain using the --skip-files flag, or the equivalent Trivy YAML config option.

Using the --skip-files flag:

$ trivy image --skip-files "/Gemfile.lock" --skip-files "/var/lib/gems/2.5.0/gems/http_parser.rb-0.6.0/Gemfile.lock" quay.io/fluentd_elasticsearch/fluentd:v2.9.0

Using the Trivy YAML configuration:

image:
  skip-files:
    - foo
    - "testdata/*/bar"

It's possible to specify globs as part of the value.

$ trivy image --skip-files "./testdata/*/bar" .

This will skip any file named bar in the subdirectories of testdata.

$ trivy config --skip-files "./foo/**/*.tf" .

This will skip any files with the extension .tf in subdirectories of foo at any depth.

Skip Directories

Scanner	Supported
Vulnerability	✓
Misconfiguration	✓
Secret	✓
License	✓

By default, Trivy traverses directories and searches for all necessary files for scanning. You can skip directories that you don't maintain using the --skip-dirs flag, or the equivalent Trivy YAML config option.

Using the --skip-dirs flag:

$ trivy image --skip-dirs /var/lib/gems/2.5.0/gems/fluent-plugin-detect-exceptions-0.0.13 --skip-dirs "/var/lib/gems/2.5.0/gems/http_parser.rb-0.6.0" quay.io/fluentd_elasticsearch/fluentd:v2.9.0

Using the Trivy YAML configuration:

image:
  skip-dirs:
    - foo/bar/
    - "**/.terraform"

It's possible to specify globs as part of the value.

$ trivy image --skip-dirs "./testdata/*" .

This will skip all subdirectories of the testdata directory.

$ trivy config --skip-dirs "**/.terraform" .

This will skip subdirectories at any depth named .terraform/. (Note: this will match ./foo/.terraform or ./foo/bar/.terraform, but not ./.terraform.)

Tip

Glob patterns work with any trivy subcommand (image, config, etc.) and can be specified to skip both directories (with --skip-dirs) and files (with --skip-files).

Advanced globbing

Trivy also supports bash style extended glob pattern matching.

$ trivy image --skip-files "**/foo" image:tag

This will skip the file foo that happens to be nested under any parent(s).

File patterns

Scanner	Supported
Vulnerability	✓
Misconfiguration	✓
Secret
License	✓1

When a directory is given as an input, Trivy will recursively look for and test all files based on file patterns. The default file patterns are here.

In addition to the default file patterns, the --file-patterns option takes regexp patterns to look for your files. For example, it may be useful when your file name of Dockerfile doesn't match the default patterns.

This can be repeated for specifying multiple file patterns.

A file pattern contains the analyzer it is used for, and the pattern itself, joined by a semicolon. For example:

--file-patterns "dockerfile:.*.docker" --file-patterns "kubernetes:*.tpl" --file-patterns "pip:requirements-.*\.txt"

The prefixes are listed here

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1. Only work with the license-full flag) ↩