kelp — CLI

Standalone command-line entry point for Kelp. Runs the same detection engine (@kelp/core) as the hosted app and the GitHub Action, so what you see locally is what CI would see.

Install

npx @kelp-security/cli scan ./my-app

Or install globally:

npm install -g @kelp-security/cli
kelp scan ./my-app

Usage

kelp scan <path> [options]

OPTIONS
  --json                     Emit findings as JSON on stdout
  --severity <sev>           Only show findings at or above <sev>
                             (critical|high|medium|low)
  --no-color                 Disable ANSI colors (NO_COLOR also works)
  --help, -h                 Show help
  --version, -v              Print version

Examples

# Scan a local project
kelp scan ./my-app

# Machine-readable output
kelp scan ./my-app --json > findings.json

# Only gate on high+critical
kelp scan . --severity high

Exit codes

| Code | Meaning | |---|---| | 0 | Scan completed, no findings above the severity floor | | 1 | Scan completed, at least one finding above the floor | | 2 | Scan itself failed (bad path, unreadable target, etc.) |

Use 1 to gate a CI job:

kelp scan . --severity high || exit 1

What gets scanned

The walker skips the well-known noise directories (node_modules, .git, dist, build, .next, vendor, __pycache__, .venv, target, coverage), lockfiles, sourcemaps, and minified bundles. Everything else is handed to the scanner, which then applies its own path filters.

Files larger than 1 MB are skipped so a stray CSV dump doesn't stall the scan.

What's detected

The v0.1 CLI runs the secret scanner from @kelp/core:

• Provider patterns for AWS, GCP, Stripe, Supabase, GitHub, Slack, OpenAI, and more (see packages/core/src/scanners/secrets.ts).
• Entropy fallback for high-entropy quoted strings not caught by a pattern.
• Client-side severity bump — a secret shipped to every visitor is more dangerous than one in server code.

Secret values themselves never leave the scanner boundary: findings carry a masked preview (sk_live_…) only.

RLS, edge-function, and BOLA scanners live in @kelp/core too and will land in the CLI progressively — see the roadmap issue.

MCP server

Kelp also ships as an MCP server for LLM clients (Claude Code, Claude Desktop, Cursor):

kelp mcp

Add it to your client's MCP config so the LLM can call scan_path, scan_snippet, list_rules, explain_finding, and explain_rule on its own, and surface /kelp:review-repo / /kelp:harden-file as slash commands. Full guide in docs/MCP.md.

Docs

• Full CLI reference
• MCP server
• Architecture
• Contributing

License

MIT — see LICENSE.