CodeQL documentation
CodeQL resources

Customizing settings

You can edit the settings for the CodeQL extension to suit your needs.

About CodeQL extension settings

The CodeQL extension comes with a number of settings that you can edit. These determine how the extension behaves, including: which version of the CodeQL CLI the extension uses, how the extension displays previous queries, and how it runs queries.

Editing settings

  1. Open the Extensions view and right click CodeQL.

  2. Click Extension Settings.

    Open the CodeQL extension settings

  3. Edit a setting. The new settings are saved automatically.

Choosing a version of the CodeQL CLI

The CodeQL extension uses the CodeQL CLI to run commands. If you already have the CLI installed and added to your PATH, the extension uses that version. This might be the case if you create your own CodeQL databases instead of downloading them from LGTM.com. Otherwise, the extension automatically manages access to the executable of the CLI for you. For more information about creating databases, see “Creating CodeQL databases” in the CLI help.

To override the default behavior and use a different CLI, you can specify the CodeQL CLI Executable Path. Note that this is only available as a user setting, not as a workspace setting.

Changing the labels of query history items

The query history Format setting controls how the extension lists queries in the query history. By default, each item has a label with the following format:

[%t] %q on %d - %s
  • %t is the time the query was run
  • %q is the query name
  • %d is the database name
  • %s is a status string

To override the default label, you can specify a different format for the query history items.

Configuring settings for running queries

There are a number of settings for Running Queries. If your queries run too slowly and time out frequently, you may want to increase the memory.

If you want to examine query performance, enable the Running Queries: Debug setting to include timing and tuple counts in the CodeQL Query Server logs shown in the Output view. The tuple count is useful because it indicates the size of the predicates computed by the query.

Configuring settings for testing queries

To increase the number of threads used for testing queries, you can update the Running Tests > Number Of Threads setting.

Further reading