google/magika

Health v2 · maintenance only

Adoption not part of the score

18718 stars · 1178 forks observed · 2026-10-15

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-10-19, confidence 0.98

Magika is an AI‑powered tool that detects a file's content type using a tiny deep‑learning model. It is available as a fast command‑line utility and as language bindings for Python, Rust, JavaScript/TypeScript and Go.

Use cases

• Identify the true MIME type of unknown files in a security pipeline
• Classify large batches of files by content type for data ingestion
• Detect file types in a CI/CD workflow to enforce policy compliance
• Replace unreliable "file" or "magic" utilities in scripts
• Provide content‑type hints for indexing services like Elasticsearch

When to choose

• You need high‑accuracy file type detection (≈99% on a 200+ type test set)
• You want a solution that runs quickly on a single CPU without GPU
• You prefer an open‑source tool with bindings for multiple languages
• You need to process thousands of files in parallel from the command line

When to avoid

• You require detection of hundreds or thousands of obscure formats not covered by the ~200 supported types
• You need real‑time inference on extremely low‑latency edge devices where even a few milliseconds matter
• You depend on a single‑language library without a binding for your stack

Facets

cli-tool · maturity active

parser cli api-framework security data-science windows cli python rust ai-powered deep-learning mime-types onnx rust-cli python-api npm-package go-wip linux macos nodejs docker

Member repositories

For agents

markdown · JSON · MCP: product_card(name="google/magika")