NVT Development and Testing

[alexxq]

I am beginning to look into writing NVTs, however I’m curious as to how people develop and test NVTs.

Particularly, I find it slow and cumbersome to test the NVTs, as it often involves copying the NVT I’m working on into a docker container (running openvas), running a rebuild, and then repeatedly running full scans (thus invoking all 50k NVTs I have from the community feed)

Is there a way that you can test one specific NVT? (as well as it somehow automatically resolving all of the NVT’s dependencies?

It would be great if I could do something like:

nvt-tester /path/to/my/nvt.nasl --target=192.168.0.40 --username=TestDomain\Administrator --password=Password123

Something where I can repeatedly tweak the NVT, and then hit that command to show me the output for a particular host.

[emoss]

Hi,

if you have installed the GSE, you should be able to run /path/to/your/installation/bin/openvas-nasl, which does what you need (I hope).

Run openvas-nasl --help to get more information.

[cfi]

Some additional full example calls can be found in the following posting:

Understanding testing of nasl scripts

Hi, you can either do a “Full Scan” via OpenVAS/GVM by using e.g. the GSA WebGUI or you can use the command line tool openvas-nasl to run a script. The first one is outside of the scope of this category and you could create a new thread in the https://community.greenbone.net/c/gse category to get some possible insights on how the scanner is doing scans and how to start such a “Full Scan” within OpenVAS/GVM. For the latter a few examples below (see the openvas-nasl --help output for a descript…