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VirusTotal CLI

Welcome to the VirusTotal CLI, a tool designed for those who love both VirusTotal and command-line interfaces. With this tool you can do everything you'd normally do using VirusTotal's web page, including:

And much more...

See it in action

asciicast

Getting started

As this tool uses the VirusTotal API under the hood, you will need a VirusTotal API key. By signing up with VirusTotal you will receive a free API key however, free API keys have a limited amount of requests per minute, and they don't have access to some premium features like searches and file downloads. If you are interested in using those premium features please contact us.

Installing the tool

There are two ways of installing the tool: by using one of our pre-compiled binaries or by building it by yourself.

Pre-compiled binaries

The pre-compiled binaries can be found on the releases page. There are binaries for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. To use them, just download the file, decompress it and place it in a directory where you think is more convenient to use.

Manual building

To compile the program you'll need Go 1.14.x or higher installed in your system and type the following commands:

$ git clone https://github.com/VirusTotal/vt-cli
$ cd vt-cli
$ make install

NOTE: in order to use the vt binary, make sure the GOBIN is part of your PATH env variable:

$ export GOBIN=`go env GOPATH`/bin
$ export PATH=$PATH:$GOBIN
Mac OS

For Mac OS users, there's a brew formula available. Please note this is not maintained by VirusTotal.

$ brew install virustotal-cli
Windows

For Windows users, there's a Winget manifest available. Please note this is not maintained by VirusTotal.

winget install VirusTotal.vt-cli

Chocolatey is also supported (Also not maintained by VirusTotal):

choco install vt-cli

A note on Window's console

If you plan to use vt-cli in Windows on a regular basis we highly recommend you avoid the standard Windows console and use Cygwin instead. The Windows console is very slow when printing large amounts of text (as vt-cli usually does) while Cygwin performs much better. Additionally, you can benefit from Cygwin's support for command auto-completion, a handy feature that the Windows console doesn't offer. In order to take advantage of auto-completion make sure to include the bash-completion package while installing Cygwin.

Configuring your API key

Once you have installed the vt-cli tool you may want to configure it with your API key. This is not strictly necessary, as you can provide your API key every time you invoke the tool by using the --apikey option (-k in short form), but that's a bit of a hassle if you are going to use the tool frequently (and we bet you'll do!). For configuring your API key just type:

$ vt init

This command will ask for your API key, and save it to a config file in your home directory (~/.vt.toml). You can also specify your API key using the VTCLI_APIKEY environment variable. If you specify your API key in multiple ways, the --apikey option will have the highest precedence, followed by the VTCLI_APIKEY environment variable, the API key in the configuration file will be used as the last resort.

Use with a proxy

If you are behind an HTTP proxy you can tell vt-cli which is the address of your proxy server in multiple ways. One is using the --proxy option, like in:

$ vt --proxy http://myproxy.com:1234 <command>

You can also use the VTCLI_PROXY environment variable, or add the following line to the config file:

proxy="http://myproxy.com:1234"

Setup Bash completion

If you are going to use this tool frequently you may want to have command auto-completion. It saves both precious time and keystrokes. Notice however that you must configure your API as described in the previous section before following the steps listed below. The API is necessary for determining the commands that you will have access to.

:heavy_exclamation_mark: You may need to restart your shell in order for autocompletion to start working.

Setup ZSH completion

The output script from vt completion zsh needs to be put somewhere under the $fpath directory. For example, .oh-my-zsh/completions directory:

$ mkdir /Users/$USERNAME/.oh-my-zsh/completions
$ vt completion zsh > /Users/$USERNAME/.oh-my-zsh/completions/_vt

Restart the shell.

Usage examples

Getting only what you want

When you ask for information about a file, URL, domain, IP address or any other object in VirusTotal, you get a lot of data (by default in YAML format) that is usually more than what you need. You can narrow down the information shown by the vt-cli tool by using the --include and --exclude command-line options (-i and -x in short form).

These options accept patterns that are matched against the fields composing the data, and allow you to include only a subset of them, or exclude any field that is not interesting for you. Let's see how it works using the data we have about http://www.virustotal.com as an example:

$ vt url http://www.virustotal.com
- _id: 1db0ad7dbcec0676710ea0eaacd35d5e471d3e11944d53bcbd31f0cbd11bce31
  _type: "url"
  first_submission_date: 1275391445  # 2010-06-01 13:24:05 +0200 CEST
  last_analysis_date: 1532442650  # 2018-07-24 16:30:50 +0200 CEST
  last_analysis_results:
    ADMINUSLabs:
      category: "harmless"
      engine_name: "ADMINUSLabs"
      result: "clean"
    AegisLab WebGuard:
      category: "harmless"
      engine_name: "AegisLab WebGuard"
      result: "clean"
    AlienVault:
      category: "harmless"
      engine_name: "AlienVault"
      result: "clean"
  last_http_response_code: 200
  last_http_response_content_length: 7216
  last_http_response_content_sha256: "7ed66734d9fb8c5a922fffd039c1cd5d85f8c2bb39d14803983528437852ba94"
  last_http_response_headers:
    age: "26"
    cache-control: "public, max-age=60"
    content-length: "7216"
    content-type: "text/html"
    date: "Tue, 24 Jul 2018 14:30:24 GMT"
    etag: "\"bGPKJQ\""
    expires: "Tue, 24 Jul 2018 14:31:24 GMT"
    server: "Google Frontend"
    x-cloud-trace-context: "131ac6cb5e2cdb7970d54ee42fd5ce4a"
    x-frame-options: "DENY"
  last_submission_date: 1532442650  # 2018-07-24 16:30:50 +0200 CEST
  private: false
  reputation: 1484
  times_submitted: 213227
  total_votes:
    harmless: 660
    malicious: 197

Notice that the returned data usually follows a hierarchical structure, with some top-level fields that may contain subfields which in turn can contain their own subfields. In the example above last_http_response_headers has subfields age, cache-control, content-length and so on, while total_votes has harmless and malicious. For referring to a particular field within the hierarchy we can use a path, similar to how we identify a file in our computers, but in this case, we are going to use a dot character (.) as the separator for path components, instead of the slashes (or backslashes) used by most file systems. The following ones are valid paths for our example structure:

The filters accepted by both --include and --exclude are paths in which we can use * and ** as placeholders for one and many path elements respectively. For example foo.* matches foo.bar but not foo.bar.baz, while foo.** matches foo.bar, foo.bar.baz and foo.bar.baz.qux. In the other hand, foo.*.qux matches foo.bar.qux and foo.baz.qux but not foo.bar.baz.qux, while foo.**.qux matches foo.bar.baz.qux and any other path starting with foo and ending with qux.

For cherry-picking only the fields you want, you should use --include followed by a path pattern as explained above. You can also include more than one pattern either by using the --include argument multiple times, or by using it with a comma-separated list of patterns. The following two options are equivalent:

$ vt url http://www.virustotal.com --include=reputation --include=total_votes.*
$ vt url http://www.virustotal.com --include=reputation,total_votes.*

Here you have different examples with their outputs (assuming that vt url http://www.virustotal.com returns the structure shown above):

$ vt url http://www.virustotal.com --include=last_http_response_headers.server
- last_http_response_headers:
    server: "Google Frontend"

$ vt url http://www.virustotal.com --include=last_http_response_headers.*
- last_http_response_headers:
    age: "26"
    cache-control: "public, max-age=60"
    content-length: "7216"
    content-type: "text/html"
    date: "Tue, 24 Jul 2018 14:30:24 GMT"
    etag: "\"bGPKJQ\""
    expires: "Tue, 24 Jul 2018 14:31:24 GMT"
    server: "Google Frontend"
    x-cloud-trace-context: "131ac6cb5e2cdb7970d54ee42fd5ce4a"
    x-frame-options: "DENY"

$ vt url http://www.virustotal.com --include=last_analysis_results.**
- last_analysis_results:
    ADMINUSLabs:
      category: "harmless"
      engine_name: "ADMINUSLabs"
      result: "clean"
    AegisLab WebGuard:
      category: "harmless"
      engine_name: "AegisLab WebGuard"
      result: "clean"
    AlienVault:
      category: "harmless"
      engine_name: "AlienVault"
      result: "clean"

$ vt url http://www.virustotal.com --include=last_analysis_results.*.result
- last_analysis_results:
    ADMINUSLabs:
      result: "clean"
    AegisLab WebGuard:
      result: "clean"
    AlienVault:
      result: "clean"

$ vt url http://www.virustotal.com --include=**.result
- last_analysis_results:
    ADMINUSLabs:
      result: "clean"
    AegisLab WebGuard:
      result: "clean"
    AlienVault:
      result: "clean"

Also notice that _id and _type are also field names and therefore you can use them in your filters:

$ vt url http://www.virustotal.com --include=_id,_type,**.result
- _id: "1db0ad7dbcec0676710ea0eaacd35d5e471d3e11944d53bcbd31f0cbd11bce31"
  _type: "file"
  last_analysis_results:
    ADMINUSLabs:
      result: "clean"
    AegisLab WebGuard:
      result: "clean"
    AlienVault:
      result: "clean"

The --exclude option works similarly to --include but instead of including the matching fields in the output, it includes everything except the matching fields. You can use this option when you want to keep most of the fields, but leave out a few of them that are not interesting. If you use --include and --exclude simultaneously --include enters in action first, including only the fields that match the --include patterns, while --exclude comes in after that, removing any remaining field that matches the --exclude patterns.