Privateer

Privateer is a validation framework that simplifies infrastructure testing and compliance validation. Built with infrastructure engineers in mind, Privateer helps accelerate security and compliance validation of any software asset.

Key Features

• Community-Driven Plugins: Plugins are crafted and maintained collaboratively by the community or privately within your organization
• Comprehensive Resource Validation: Validate diverse resources in a single execution, regardless of how many resources or validations you need to queue
• Consistent Machine-Readable Output: Standardized output simplifies automation and integration
• Plugin Generation: Generate plugin scaffolding from Gemara Layer 2 schema catalogs with the push of a button

Quick Start

For detailed ecosystem documentation, visit privateerproj.com

Step 1: Star this Repo

Click the star at the top right of this page so that you can find it easily the next time you sign in to GitHub.

Step 2: Choose Your Installation Method

Option 1: Install via Script

/bin/bash -c "$(curl -sSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/privateerproj/privateer/main/install.sh)"

Option 2: Download from Releases Download the latest release from GitHub Releases.

Option 3: Build from Source

git clone https://github.com/privateerproj/privateer.git
cd privateer
go mod tidy
make build

Step 3: Choose Your Plugins

We do not currently maintain an authoritative list of community plugins, but a good place to start would be the OpenSSF's plugin for scanning GitHub repos against the Open Source Project Security Baseline.

Step 4: Install & Verify Your Plugins

Plugin installation is currently left to the user. The default location for plugin binaries is $HOME/.privateer/bin. You may specify a different location at runtime via --binaries-path if you install your plugins elsewhere.

To review the plugins you have installed, run privateer list -a.

Contributing

We welcome contributions! See our Contributing Guidelines for details.

All contributions are covered by the Apache 2 License at the time the pull request is opened, and all community interactions are governed by our Code of Conduct.

Local Development Prerequisites

• Go 1.25.1 or later - Required for building Privateer and running tests
• Make - For using the Makefile build targets

Testing

Run all tests:

make test

Run tests with coverage:

make testcov

Available Make Targets

• make binary - Build the binary
• make test - Run tests and vet checks
• make testcov - Run tests with coverage report
• make tidy - Clean up go.mod dependencies
• make release - Build release binaries for all platforms
• make build - Alias for tidy test binary

Project Structure

privateer/
├── cmd/              # CLI commands (run, list, generate-plugin, etc.)
├── test/             # Test data and fixtures
├── build/            # Build scripts and CI configurations
├── main.go           # Application entry point
└── go.mod            # Go module dependencies

Security

For vulnerability reporting, please reference our Security Policy. For security questions, please search our closed issues and open a new issue if your question has not yet been answered.

Helpful Links

• Privateer SDK - SDK for developing Privateer plugins
• Privateer Documentation - Complete documentation site
• Example Plugin - Reference implementation