Snyk for Elixir

Snyk offers security scanning to test your Elixir Projects for vulnerabilities using the CLI.

Features of Snyk for Elixir

Package managers / Features	CLI support	Git support	License scanning	Fix PRs
Mix/Hex	✔︎

How Snyk for Elixir works

Snyk builds a dependency tree for your Project by analyzing your manifest and lock files.

After Snyk builds the tree, Snyk uses the vulnerability database to find vulnerabilities in the packages anywhere in the dependency tree.

Snyk CLI for Elixir projects

Mix/Hex

To scan your dependencies, first install Elixir and Mix. For details, see the Elixir installation instructions.

Mix is a build tool that provides tasks for creating, compiling, and testing Elixir Projects, managing its dependencies, and more.

Mix manages dependencies by integrating with the Hex package manager.

To build the dependency tree, Snyk analyzes your mix.exs and mix.lock files. The mix.lock file must be present and in sync with the mix.exs file.

Project naming

Projects in the Snyk UI are named according to the app keyword from the project/0 function exported by Mix.Project in the main mix.exs file.

To override the name, use the --project-name CLI option.

Umbrella projects

If you test a Mix Umbrella project, Snyk detects that this is an umbrella project and includes all the child apps automatically.

Along with the main mix.exs, each app mix.exs appears as a separate project in the Snyk UI, named according to the path to the app.

Dependency types

Snyk fully supports all :hex packages listed in the Mix project, including all their transitive dependencies and any vulnerabilities.

Hex support includes both Elixir and Erlang packages.

Snyk also has limited support for :path, :git and :github dependencies, but not their transitive dependencies or vulnerabilities.

• :path dependencies appear in the dependency tree by name

• :git and :github dependencies appear in the dependency tree by repository URL and version (either :branch, :tag or :ref, as defined in the mix.exs file)