Snyk Language Server

Snyk offers IDE integrations that allow you to use the functionality of Snyk in your Integrated Development Environment or Editor. This page describes the Snyk Language Server that can provide diagnostics for any IDE or Editor that supports the Language Server Protocol. For information about all of the IDE plugins and their use, see Snyk for IDEs in the docs.

The Snyk Language Server scans for vulnerabilities, open source license issues, and infrastructure misconfigurations and returns results with security issues categorized by issue type and severity.

For open source, you receive automated, algorithm-based fix suggestions for both direct and transitive dependencies.

Snyk Language Server scans for the following types of issues:

Open Source Security - security vulnerabilities and license issues in both the direct and indirect (transitive) open-source dependencies pulled into the Snyk Project. See also the Open Source docs.
Code Security - security vulnerabilities in your code. See also the Snyk Code docs.
Infrastructure as Code (IaC) Security - configuration issues in your IaC templates: Terraform, Kubernetes, CloudFormation, and Azure Resource Manager. See also the Snyk Infrastructure as Code docs.

After you have installed and configured the Language Server, every time you run it, open a file, or save, Snyk scans the manifest files, proprietary code, and configuration files in your project. Snyk delivers actionable vulnerability, license, or misconfiguration issue details and displays the results natively within the LSP supporting Editor or IDE.

This page explains supported environments, support, and giving feedback and provides installation instructions.

Supported operating systems and architecture

Snyk plugins are not supported on any operating system that has reached End Of Life (EOL) with the distributor.

You can use the Language Server in the following environments:

Linux: AMD64 and ARM64
Linux Alpine: 386 and AMD64
Windows: 386, AMD64, ARM via 386 compatibility
MacOS: AMD64 and ARM64

Where you can download the Language Server

Snyk Language Server is automatically downloaded only when you use the Visual Studio Code (VS Code) and Eclipse plugins. Language Server can also be downloaded manually; the following shell script shows how to do that.

getLanguageServer.sh

#!/bin/bash
# This file allows you to download the latest language server, which is helpful for integration into non-managed Editors and IDEs.
# This might be any editor that does not have a downloader built by Snyk and thus needs to download
# and update the language server regularly, and this script allows this for system administrators and users.
# Snyk recommends always using the latest version of the language server.

set -e
OS=$(uname -s | tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]')
ARCH=$(uname -m | tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]')
if [[ $ARCH == "x86_64" ]]; then
  ARCH="amd64"
fi
if [[ $ARCH == "aarch64" ]]; then
  ARCH="arm64"
fi
PROTOCOL_VERSION=3
VERSION=$(curl https://static.snyk.io/snyk-ls/$PROTOCOL_VERSION/metadata.json | jq .version | sed -e s/\"//g)
wget -O /usr/local/bin/snyk-ls "https://static.snyk.io/snyk-ls/$PROTOCOL_VERSION/snyk-ls_${VERSION}_${OS}_${ARCH}"

The PROTOCOL_VERSION is 3, but may increase with ongoing development.

Configuration of Snyk Language Server

Snyk LSP command line flags

-c <FILE> allows specifying a config file to load before all others.

-l <LOGLEVEL> allows specifying the log level (trace, debug, info, warn, error, fatal). The default log level is info.

-o <FORMAT> allows specifying the output format (md or html) for issues.

-f <FILE> allows specifying a log file instead of logging to the console.

-licenses displays the licenses used by Language Server.

LSP initialization options

As part of the Initialize message within initializationOptions?: LSPAny; Snyk supports the following settings:

{
  "activateSnykOpenSource": "true", // Enables Snyk Open Source - defaults to true
  "activateSnykCode": "false", // Enables Snyk Code, if enabled for your organization - defaults to false
  "activateSnykIac":  "true", // Enables Infrastructure as Code - defaults to true
  "insecure": "false", // Allows custom CAs (Certification Authorities)
  "endpoint":  "https://example.com", // Snyk API Endpoint required for non-default multi-tenant and single-tenant setups
  "additionalParams": "--all-projects", // Any extra params for the Snyk CLI, separated by spaces
  "additionalEnv":  "MAVEN_OPTS=-Djava.awt.headless=true;FOO=BAR", // Additional environment variables, separated by semicolons
  "path": "/usr/local/bin", // Adds to the system path used by the CLI
  "sendErrorReports":  "true", // Whether or not to report errors to Snyk - defaults to true
  "organization": "a string", // The name of your organization, e.g. the output of: curl -H "Authorization: token $(snyk config get api)"  https://api.snyk.io/v1/cli-config/settings/sast | jq .org
  "enableTelemetry":  "true", // Whether or not user analytics can be tracked
  "manageBinariesAutomatically": "true", // Whether or not CLI/LS binaries will be downloaded & updated automatically
  "cliPath":  "/a/patch/snyk-cli", // The path where the CLI can be found, or where it should be downloaded to
  "token":  "secret-token", // The Snyk token, e.g.: snyk config get api
  "automaticAuthentication": "true", // Whether or not LS will automatically authenticate on scan start (default: true)
  "enableTrustedFoldersFeature": "true", // Whether or not LS will prompt to trust a folder (default: true)
  "trustedFolders": ["/a/trusted/path", "/another/trusted/path"], // An array of folder that should be trusted
}

For all .NET Projects, Snyk recommends adding the --all-projects additional parameter.

Authentication for Snyk Language Server

When Snyk Language Server starts, it checks for a token in the initializationOption token. If a token is not there, Snyk Language Server tries to retrieve and authenticate using the Snyk CLI. If the CLI is not authenticated either, Snyk Language Server opens a browser window to authenticate. After successful authentication in the web browser, Snyk Language Server automatically retrieves the Snyk authentication token from the CLI.

Environment variables for Snyk Language Server

Snyk Language Server and Snyk CLI support and need certain environment variables to function:

HTTP_PROXY, HTTPS_PROXY and NO_PROXY to define the http proxy to be used
JAVA_HOME to analyze Java JVM-based projects via Snyk CLI
PATH to find maven when analyzing Maven projects, to find python and so on

Auto-configuration of environment variables for Snyk Language Server

To automatically add these variables to the environment, Snyk Language Server searches for the following files, with the order determining precedence. If the executable is not called from an already configured environment (for example, via zsh -i -c 'snyk-ls'), you can also specify the config file with the -c command line flag for setting the required variables. Snyk Language Server reads the following files in the given precedence and order, not overwriting the already loaded variables.

given config file via -c flag
<working-dir>/.snyk.env
$HOME/.snyk.env

Any lines that contain an environment variable in the format VARIABLENAME=VARIABLEVALUE are added automatically to the environment if not already there. This adheres to the dotenv format. In the case of .profile, .zshrcand so on, if a variable is directly exported, for example, via export VARIABLENAME=VARIABLEVALUE, it is not loaded. The export would need to be split of and be in its own line, for example

VARIABLENAME=VARIABLEVALUE
export VARIABLENAME

The PATH variable is treated differently frrom all other variables, as it is an aggregate of all PATH variables found in the files and in the environment. Also, the current working directory . is automatically added to the path, so a download of the Snyk CLI into the current working directory by an LSP client would yield a found Snyk CLI for the Language Server.

In addition to configuring variables via config files, Snyk Language Server adds the following directories to the path on Linux and macOS:

/bin
$HOME/bin
/usr/local/bin
$JAVA_HOME/bin

If no JAVA_HOME is set, Snyk Language Server automatically searches for a java executable first in path, then in the following directories, and adds the parent directory of its parent as JAVA_HOME. The following directories are recursively searched:

/usr/lib
/usr/java
/opt
/Library
$HOME/.sdkman
C:\Program Files
C:\Program Files (x86)

The same directories are searched for a Maven executable and the parent directory is added to the path.

Snyk CLI

To find the automatically managed Snyk CLI, the XDG Data Home and PATH path are automatically scanned for the OS-dependent file, for example, snyk-macos on macOS, snyk-linux on Linux and snyk-win.exe on Windows, and the first path where it is found is added to the environment. It is later used for all functionality that depends on the CLI. The path to the CLI can also be set manually using the cliPath initialization option.

Folder trust

As part of examining the codebase for vulnerabilities, Snyk may automatically execute code on your computer to obtain additional data for analysis. This includes invoking the package manager (for example, pip, Gradle, Maven, Yarn, npm, and so on) to get dependency information for Snyk Open Source. Invoking these programs on untrusted code that has malicious configurations may expose your system to malicious code execution and exploits.

To safeguard against using the Language Server on untrusted folders, the Snyk Language Server asks for folder trust before running scans against these folders. When in doubt, do not grant trust.

The trust feature is enabled by default. When a folder is trusted, all sub-folders are also trusted. After a folder is trusted, Snyk Language Server notifies the Language Server Client with the custom $/snyk.addTrustedFolders notification, which contains a list of trusted folder paths. Based on this, a client can then implement logic to intercept this notification and persist the decision and trust in the IDE or Editor storage mechanism.

Trust dialogs can be disabled by setting enableTrustedFoldersFeature to false in the initialization options. This disables all trust prompts and checks.

An initial set of trusted folders can be provided by setting trustedFolders to an array of paths in the initializationOptions. These folders will be trusted on startup and will not prompt the user to trust them.

Telemetry

Snyk collects telemetry from IDE plugins and CLI. For details, see IDE and CLI usage telemetry.

Support policy for Snyk Language Server

This policy will be effective beginning on June 24, 2025.

Snyk supports the latest 12 months of LS versions, ensuring functionality and performance. Older versions are considered End-of-Support (EOS) and will not receive bug fixes or troubleshooting.

Snyk only provides fixes in new versions and cannot fix older versions. Customers must upgrade to benefit from improvements.

This policy fosters innovation while optimizing resources.

If you need help, submit a request to Snyk Support.

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