Rowan

Find security issues in your code and AI/ML projects, with evidence you can review.

Rowan reads your project's source code and model files and reports likely vulnerabilities: injection, unsafe deserialization, SSRF, leaked secrets, risky agent tools, unsafe model loading and more. It never runs your code.

Alpha. Treat every finding as a lead to check, not a confirmed bug. A clean report does not prove a project is secure.

Quick start

You need Python 3.10+ and pipx, which installs command-line tools into their own environment (on macOS: brew install pipx, then pipx ensurepath and open a new terminal).

1. Install Rowan:

pipx install "rowan-sast[js-crossfile]"

Already use uv? uv tool install "rowan-sast[js-crossfile]" works too. A plain pip install fails on Homebrew Python by design; see getting started for a virtual-environment install.

2. Install the scan engine (Opengrep) and check it:

rowan install-engine
export PATH="$HOME/.local/bin:$PATH"
rowan self-test

self-test should print [OK] three times.

3. Scan a project:

rowan scan /path/to/your-project

Windows, troubleshooting and more detail: getting started.

Let your coding agent do it

Paste this into Claude Code, Codex, Cursor or any agent that can run terminal commands, with your project open:

Install Rowan and scan this project for security issues.
1. Install it in its own folder (not inside this project) by following
   https://github.com/hedgerow-dev/rowan/blob/main/docs/getting-started.md
2. Run `rowan self-test`. If the engine is not [OK], stop and tell me.
3. Run: rowan scan <this project's absolute path> --no-project-config
   --no-sca --audit -f json -o <a folder outside this project>/rowan-report.json
4. If summary.degraded is true, tell me the scan is incomplete and why.
5. List the High and Critical findings with file:line links. For each one,
   say whether you checked the code or it is still just a lead.
6. Do not change any code in this project.

--no-sca keeps this first scan offline. Drop it to also check your dependencies for known CVEs (this sends package names and versions to OSV).

Common commands

rowan scan PATH                                  # readable report
rowan scan PATH --audit                          # include low-severity findings
rowan scan PATH -f json -o report.json           # save a report (also: html, sarif)
rowan scan PATH --ci --severity high             # CI: exit 1 on high/critical findings
rowan scan PATH --write-baseline base.json       # record today's findings...
rowan scan PATH --ci --baseline base.json        # ...then report only new ones

With --ci, exit code 0 means no findings, 1 means findings, and 2 means the scan was incomplete. Reports can contain source code and secrets: review them before sharing.

What it checks

Python and JS/TS get the deepest analysis. Java, Kotlin and C# get within-file dataflow. Ruby, PHP and Rust get limited pattern checks. The report lists what it could not analyze.

The rule catalog has 591 rules across 48 YAML files. That is 400 regex rules and 191 taint rules (Opengrep). See the rule catalog.

Privacy

rowan scan never calls an LLM or uploads your code. Its only network calls are dependency lookups (OSV and FIRST EPSS), which --no-sca turns off. The experimental rowan hunt command does send code to the LLM you configure: see the usage guide.

More

• Getting started: install, first scan, MCP setup, troubleshooting
• Capabilities: what Rowan finds, how it compares, measured results
• Usage guide: every option, configuration, baselines, CI and GitHub Action
• Contributing and architecture
• Security policy: report a vulnerability in Rowan privately

License

MIT. Opengrep is a separate LGPL-2.1 engine and is not bundled.