cnquery

Open source, cloud-native asset inventory and discovery

cnquery is a cloud-native tool for querying your entire fleet. It answers thousands of questions about your infrastructure and integrates with over 300 resources across cloud accounts, Kubernetes, containers, services, VMs, APIs, and more.

Here are a few more examples:

# run a query and print the output
cnquery run -c "ports.listening { port process }"

# execute a query pack on a Docker image and print results as json
cnquery scan docker 14119a -f pack.mql.yaml -j

# open an interactive shell to an aws account
cnquery shell aws
> aws.ec2.instances{*}

📚 To learn more, read the cnquery docs.

Installation

Install cnquery with our installation script:

Linux and macOS

bash -c "$(curl -sSL https://install.mondoo.com/sh)"

Windows

Set-ExecutionPolicy Unrestricted -Scope Process -Force;
[System.Net.ServicePointManager]::SecurityProtocol = [System.Net.ServicePointManager]::SecurityProtocol -bor 3072;
iex ((New-Object System.Net.WebClient).DownloadString('https://install.mondoo.com/ps1'));
Install-Mondoo;

If you prefer manual installation, you can find the cnquery packages in our GitHub releases.

Interactive shell

The easiest way to explore cnquery is to use our interactive shell, which has auto-complete to guide you:

cnquery shell

Once inside the shell, you can enter MQL queries like this:

> asset { name title }

To learn more, use the help command.

To exit, either press CTRL + D or type exit.

You can run the shell against local and remote targets like k8s, aws, docker, and many more. Run --help to see a full list of supported providers.

Run simple queries

To run standalone queries in your shell, use the run command:

cnquery run <TARGET> -c <QUERY>

For example, this runs a query against your local system:

cnquery run -c "services { name running }"

For automation, it is often helpful to convert the output to JSON. Use -j or --json:

cnquery run local -c "services { * }" -j

You can then pipe the output to jq or other applications.

Query packs

You can combine multiple queries into query packs, which can run together. cnquery comes with default query packs out of the box for most systems. You can run:

cnquery scan

Without specifying anything else, cnquery tries to find and run the default query pack for the given system.

You can specify a query pack that you want to run. Use the --querypack argument:

cnquery scan --querypack incident-response

You can also choose just one query from a query pack. Specify the query ID with the query pack:

cnquery scan --querypack incident-response --query-id sth-01

Custom query packs let you bundle queries to meet your specific needs. You can find a simple query pack example in examples/simple.mql.yaml. To run it:

cnquery scan -f examples/example-os.mql.yaml

Like all other commands, you can specify different providers like k8s, aws, docker, and many more. Run --help to see the full list of supported providers.

These files can also contain multiple query packs for many different target systems.

Explore your infrastructure in Mondoo Platform​

To more easily explore your infrastructure, sign up for a free Mondoo Platform account. Mondoo's web-based console allows you to navigate, search, and arrange all of your assets.

Go to console.mondoo.com to sign up.

To learn about Mondoo Platform, read the Mondoo Platform docs or visit mondoo.com.

Distribute queries across your fleet with private query packs

You can create and share query packs using the Registry in the Mondoo Console. The Registry is a secure, private environment in your account where you store both Mondoo query packs and custom query packs. This lets you use the same query packs for all assets.

To use the Registry:

cnquery login --token TOKEN

Once set up, enable the query packs you want to use to collect your asset's data. For example, you can activate one or more AWS query packs in the Mondoo Console. Then run this command any time to collect the AWS information you need:

cnquery scan aws

To add custom query packs, you can upload them:

cnquery bundle upload mypack.mql.yaml

Supported targets

What's next?

There are so many things cnquery can do! Gather information about your fleet, find tool-sprawl across systems, run incident response, and share data with auditors… cnquery is nearly limitless in capabilities.

Explore:

• cnquery docs
• Query packs
• MQL introduction
• MQL language reference
• cnspec, our open source, cloud-native security scanner

Join the community!

Our goal is to become the API for your entire infrastructure. Join our community today and let's grow it together!

Development

See our development documentation for information on building and contributing to cnquery.

Legal

• Copyright: 2018-2023, Mondoo, Inc.
• License: MPLv2
• Authors: Christoph Hartmann, Dominik Richter