explaingit

prowler-cloud/prowler

13,793PythonAudience · ops devopsComplexity · 3/5Setup · moderate

TLDR

An open-source tool that scans cloud accounts across AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and more to automatically find security misconfigurations and compliance gaps across hundreds of pre-built checks.

Mindmap

mindmap
  root((Prowler))
    What it does
      Cloud security scan
      Compliance reports
      Attack path analysis
    Cloud Support
      AWS 595 checks
      Azure
      Google Cloud
      Kubernetes
    Compliance
      CIS benchmarks
      PCI DSS
      HIPAA GDPR
    Setup
      pip install
      Docker container
      Prowler Cloud SaaS
    Audience
      DevOps teams
      Security engineers
Click or tap to explore — scroll the page freely

Code map

Detail Auto

An interactive map of this repo's files and how they connect — its source is parsed live in your browser. Click Visualize to build it.

filefunction / class

Things people build with this

USE CASE 1

Scan your AWS account for misconfigurations and see which of 595 security checks pass or fail.

USE CASE 2

Generate a compliance report mapped to PCI-DSS, HIPAA, SOC 2, or GDPR to prepare for an audit.

USE CASE 3

Visualize how individual cloud misconfigurations chain into potential attack paths using the Attack Paths feature.

USE CASE 4

Run automated security checks against Kubernetes clusters or infrastructure-as-code files.

Tech stack

PythonDockerNeo4j

Getting it running

Difficulty · moderate Time to first run · 30min

The Attack Paths feature requires a running Neo4j instance, basic security scans work immediately after pip install with cloud credentials configured.

In plain English

Prowler is a free, open-source tool that automatically checks your cloud accounts for security problems and compliance gaps. You point it at your cloud provider, and it runs hundreds of pre-built tests to find misconfigurations, open permissions, and other issues that could put your data at risk. The tool supports a wide range of cloud platforms: AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, Kubernetes, Microsoft 365, GitHub, Oracle Cloud, Alibaba Cloud, Cloudflare, and MongoDB Atlas, among others. For AWS alone it runs 595 checks across 84 services. It also covers infrastructure-as-code files and AI model safety checks. Results can be viewed through a command-line interface, a web dashboard, or a hosted web application called Prowler Cloud. Compliance is a big part of what Prowler does. It maps its findings to a long list of industry standards and regulations, including CIS benchmarks, NIST frameworks, PCI-DSS, HIPAA, GDPR, SOC 2, ISO 27001, FedRAMP, and more. If your organization needs to demonstrate that it follows one of these frameworks, Prowler can generate a report showing which controls you pass or fail. You can also build custom frameworks tailored to your own requirements. A newer feature called Attack Paths connects scan results to a graph database to show how individual misconfigurations could be chained together into a larger attack. This requires a Neo4j instance running alongside Prowler, which the bundled Docker Compose setup provides. Prowler can be installed as a Python package via pip, run as a Docker container, or pulled from the AWS Elastic Container Registry. A hosted version, Prowler Cloud, offers a web interface for teams that prefer not to run the tool themselves. The project is actively maintained, has a public Slack community, and scores well on Linux Foundation health metrics. If you manage cloud infrastructure and want an automated way to catch security issues before attackers do, this is a well-established starting point.

Copy-paste prompts

Prompt 1
I need to scan my AWS account with Prowler and get a report of failing security checks. Walk me through installing it with pip and running a basic scan.
Prompt 2
How do I run a Prowler scan mapped specifically to the CIS AWS benchmark and export the results as a CSV?
Prompt 3
I want to use Prowler Attack Paths to see how misconfigurations could be chained into an attack. How do I set up the Neo4j integration with Docker Compose?
Prompt 4
Show me how to run Prowler as a Docker container against my Azure subscription to check for GDPR compliance gaps.
Open on GitHub → Explain another repo

← prowler-cloud on gitmyhub — every repo by this author, as a profile.

Verify against the repo before relying on details.