Dependency Scanning compared to Container Scanning

GitLab offers both Dependency Scanning and Container Scanning to ensure coverage for all of these dependency types. To cover as much of your risk area as possible, we encourage you to use all of our security scanning tools:

  • Dependency Scanning analyzes your project and tells you which software dependencies, including upstream dependencies, have been included in your project, and what known risks the dependencies contain.
  • Container Scanning analyzes your containers and tells you about known risks in the operating system’s (OS) packages.

The following table summarizes which types of dependencies each scanning tool can detect:

FeatureDependency ScanningContainer Scanning
Identify the manifest, lock file, or static file that introduced the dependencycheck-circledotted-circle
Development dependenciescheck-circledotted-circle
Dependencies in a lock file committed to your repositorycheck-circlecheck-circle 1
Binaries built by Godotted-circlecheck-circle 2
Dynamically-linked language-specific dependencies installed by the Operating Systemdotted-circlecheck-circle
Operating system dependenciesdotted-circlecheck-circle
Language-specific dependencies installed on the operating system (not built by your project)dotted-circlecheck-circle
  1. Lock file must be present in the image to be detected.
  2. Report language-specific findings must be enabled, and binaries must be present in the image to be detected.