# VirusTotal/yara

The pattern matching swiss knife

Repository: https://github.com/VirusTotal/yara
Canonical: https://ross.abutalabs.com/products/yara
Homepage: https://virustotal.github.io/yara/
Language: C
License: BSD-3-Clause
License Family: permissive
Last push: 2026-08-25T10:54:31+00:00

## Health v2 (maintenance only)
Score: 94/100 (v2, computed 2026-09-02T17:46:02.011165+00:00)
- activity 99, release rhythm 83, longevity 100
- inputs: {"age_days": 5018, "days_push": 8, "days_rel": 36, "gap_med": 80.0, "n_releases_24m": 7}
- flags: none
- formula: round(0.45*activity + 0.35*rhythm + 0.20*longevity); archived -> min(score, 10)

## Adoption (not part of the score)
Stars 9831, forks 1587 (observed 2026-08-28T04:10:37.408354+00:00)

## What it is
YARA is a pattern matching tool used to identify and classify malware families and other files based on textual or binary pattern rules. It runs multi-platform via a command-line interface or as a library, including a Python extension (yara-python).

## Use cases
- identify and classify malware samples by pattern rules
- scan files for suspicious strings or binary signatures
- write rules to detect malware families
- scan memory dumps for indicators of compromise
- integrate pattern scanning into Python scripts
- hunt for threats across a file corpus

## When to choose
- you need rule-based detection of malware or file patterns
- you want a widely adopted, battle-tested scanning engine with a large rule ecosystem
- you need cross-platform scanning from CLI or embedded library

## When to avoid
- you want active development and modern performance - the project is in maintenance mode in favor of YARA-X
- you need general-purpose full-text search rather than rule-based binary matching

## Facets
- artifact type: cli-tool
- maturity: maintenance
- function: search-engine, parser, cli, security
- domain: security, reverse-engineering, developer-tools
- platform: windows, python, cli, cross-platform
- tags: pattern-matching, yara-rules, malware-classification, threat-detection, file-scanning, incident-response, c, malware-analysis, linux, macos

## Member repositories
- VirusTotal/yara (main) score 94

## Provenance
- Observed fields: from GitHub, fetched 2026-08-28T04:10:37.408354+00:00.
- Health v2: computed from the inputs above; adoption is never an input.
- Inferred fields (summary, facets, guidance): AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, on 2026-08-29T17:20:55.773232+00:00, confidence not recorded.
  - readme: https://github.com/VirusTotal/yara (fetched 2026-08-28T04:10:37.408354+00:00, sha 44c9da8b8132)
  - homepage: https://virustotal.github.io/yara/ (fetched 2026-08-29T08:20:22.749215+00:00, sha 1dd17c530378)
- Data as of 2026-08-30T08:39:29.467469+00:00.