nuclei/docs/faq/templates.mdx

---
title: "Templates"
---

<AccordionGroup>
  <Accordion title="What are nuclei templates?" icon="circle-info" iconType="solid">
    Nuclei [templates](http://github.com/projectdiscovery/nuclei-templates) are the core of the nuclei project. The templates contain the actual logic that is executed in order to detect various vulnerabilities. The project consists of **several thousand** ready-to-use **[community-contributed](https://github.com/projectdiscovery/nuclei-templates/graphs/contributors)** vulnerability templates.
  </Accordion>

  <Accordion title="How can I write nuclei templates?" icon="circle-info" iconType="solid">
    We maintain a [template guide](/template-guide/introduction) for writing new and custom nuclei templates. We also have [example templates](/template-example/http/base-http) for various modules nuclei supports.

  </Accordion>

  <Accordion title="Is writing nuclei templates useful?" icon="fire-flame-curved" iconType="solid">
    Performing security assessment of an application is time-consuming. It's always better and time-saving to automate steps whenever possible. Once you've found a security vulnerability, you can prepare a nuclei template by defining the required HTTP request to reproduce the issue, and test the same vulnerability across multiple hosts with ease. It's worth mentioning ==you write the template once and use it forever==, as you don't need to manually test that specific vulnerability any longer.

	Here are few examples from the community making use of templates to automate the security findings.
    <Accordion title="Reference" icon="pencil">
        - https://dhiyaneshgeek.github.io/web/security/2021/02/19/exploiting-out-of-band-xxe/
		- https://blog.melbadry9.xyz/fuzzing/nuclei-cache-poisoning
		- https://blog.melbadry9.xyz/dangling-dns/xyz-services/ddns-worksites
		- https://blog.melbadry9.xyz/dangling-dns/aws/ddns-ec2-current-state
		- https://blog.projectdiscovery.io/writing-nuclei-templates-for-wordpress-cves/
    </Accordion>

  </Accordion>

  <Accordion title="How do I run nuclei templates?" icon="circle-info" iconType="solid">
    Nuclei templates can be executed using a template name or with tags, using `-templates` (`-t`) and `-tags` flag, respectively.

	```
	nuclei -tags cve -list target_urls.txt
	```
  </Accordion>
  
  <Accordion title="I want to contribute nuclei templates! 😁" icon="circle-info" iconType="solid">
   You are always welcome to share your nuclei templates with the community. You can either open a [GitHub issue](https://github.com/projectdiscovery/nuclei-templates/issues/new?assignees=&labels=nuclei-template&template=submit-template.md&title=%5Bnuclei-template%5D+template-name) with the template details or open a GitHub [pull request](https://github.com/projectdiscovery/nuclei-templates/pulls) with your nuclei templates. If you don't have a GitHub account, you can also make use of the [discord server](https://discord.gg/projectdiscovery) to share the template with us.
  </Accordion>


  <Accordion title="I'm getting false-positive results!" icon="triangle-exclamation" iconType="solid">
    The nuclei template project is a **community-contributed project**. The ProjectDiscovery team manually reviews templates before merging them into the project. Still, there is a possibility that some templates with weak matchers will slip through the verification. This could produce false-positive results. **Templates are only as good as their matchers.**

	If you identified templates producing false positive/negative results, here are few steps that you can follow to fix them quickly.

          <Accordion title="I found a template producing false positive or negative results, but I'm not sure if this is accurate." icon="circle-info" iconType="solid">
           Direct message us on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/pdnuclei) or [Discord](https://discord.gg/projectdiscovery) to confirm the validity of the template.
          </Accordion>  

          <Accordion title="I found a template producing false positive or negative result and I don't know how to fix it." icon="circle-info" iconType="solid">
           Please open a GitHub [issue](https://github.com/projectdiscovery/nuclei-templates/issues/new?assignees=&labels=false-positive&template=false-positive.md&title=%5Bfalse-positive%5D+template-name+) with details, and we will work to address the problem and update the template.
          </Accordion>  

          <Accordion title="I found a template producing a false positive or negative result and I know how to fix it." icon="circle-info" iconType="solid">
           Please open a GitHub [pull request](https://github.com/projectdiscovery/nuclei-templates/pulls) with fix.
          </Accordion>  

  </Accordion>

  <Accordion title="I'm not able to run all templates!" icon="triangle-exclamation" iconType="solid">
    The nuclei templates project houses a variety of templates which perform fuzzing and other actions which may result in a DoS against the target system (see [the list here](https://github.com/projectdiscovery/nuclei-templates/blob/master/.nuclei-ignore)). To ensure  these templates are not accidentally run, they are tagged and excluded them from the default scan. These templates can be only executed when explicitly invoked using the `-itags` option.

  </Accordion>

   <Accordion title="Templates exist on GitHub but are not running with nuclei?" icon="triangle-exclamation" iconType="solid">
    When you download or update nuclei templates using the nuclei binary, it downloads all the templates from the latest **release**. All templates added after the release exist in the [master branch](https://github.com/projectdiscovery/nuclei-templates) and are added to nuclei when a new template release is created.
  </Accordion>

</AccordionGroup>