Manage cnquery Providers

Providers are the components of cnquery that allow it to query specific platforms. By default, cnquery automatically manages providers for you. To learn more, read About cnquery Providers.

Install, update, and remove providers

You can download the latest versions of providers at https://releases.mondoo.com/providers/. Past versions are always available at the same location.

These are the available cnquery providers:

To learn what providers are installed, run:

cnquery providers

For help on the providers subcommand, run:

cnquery providers -h

Manually install a provider

To install a provider, run:

cnquery providers install NAME

For NAME, substitute the provider name (as shown in the table above). For example:

cnquery providers install k8s

For help on manual provider installation, run:

cnquery providers install -h

To install a provider from a file, run:

cnquery providers install -f PATH

For PATH, substitute the path and name of the provider file. For example:

cnquery providers install -f providers/os/dist/os.tar.xz

To install a provider from a URL, run:

cnquery providers install --url URL

For URL, substitute the location and name of the provider file. For example:

cnquery providers install --url https://releases.mondoo.com/providers/os/9.0.7/os_9.0.7_linux_arm.tar.xz

Manually update providers

To update to the latest version of all installed providers, run:

cnquery providers update

To update to the latest version of a specific provider, run:

cnquery providers update NAME

For NAME, substitute the name of the provider (as shown in the table above). For example:

cnquery providers update vsphere

Remove providers

To remove a provider, run:

cnquery providers remove NAME

For NAME, substitute the name of the provider you want to uninstall. For example:

cnquery providers remove terraform

Disable automatic provider updates

By default, each time you run a cnquery command, cnquery downloads and installs the latest version of the provider needed to execute the command (unless the latest version of the provider is already installed). You can change this behavior by disabling automatic updates for cnquery.

If you disable automatic updates, cnquery doesn't check whether the latest version of the necessary provider is installed. It uses the version of the necessary provider that is currently installed. If the provider isn't installed, the command fails.

Disable automatic provider updates for all cnquery commands and Mondoo scans

To never automatically update providers, set the auto-update value in the cnquery configuration file to false.

On a Linux or macOS host, cnquery configuration is stored in one of these locations:

• /etc/opt/mondoo/mondoo.yml configures cnquery for all user accounts.

• ~/.config/mondoo/mondoo.yml configures cnquery for a single user.

On a Windows host, cnquery configuration is stored in one of these locations:

• C:\ProgramData\mondoo\mondoo.yml configures cnquery for all users.

• C:\Users\{username}\.config\mondoo\mondoo.yml configures cnquery for a single user.

To configure cnquery to never update providers, set the configuration:

auto-update: false

Disable automatic provider updates for a single cnquery command

To skip checking for, downloading, and installing the latest provider just once (for a single cnquery command), add the --auto-update=false flag to the command. For example, this scans the local machine without automatically updating the provider:

cnquery scan --auto-update=false

The command line flag overrides the mondoo.yml configuration file setting.