When was the incremental scanning feature of the CodeQL CLI released?

[Exloit]

I saw on this website (https://github.blog/changelog/2025-05-28-incremental-security-analysis-makes-codeql-up-to-20-faster-in-pull-requests/
) that the incremental scanning feature was already implemented in May. May I ask when this feature will be released in a new version of the CodeQL CLI? I haven’t seen any related documentation introducing this new capability yet.

[mbg]

Hi @Exloit 👋🏻

Just to clarify: I think your question is about when incremental analysis will be usable with just the CLI, outside of an Actions workflow?

If so, there's some subtly to this answer. While the blog post you linked to talks about incremental analysis, this actually refers to a collection of related, but different features. Fundamentally, all of those features actually depend on corresponding CLI (and language) support. The one that the blog post you linked to talks about specifically is diff-informed queries, which is comprised of two aspects:

• Allowing CodeQL queries to consider whether code relates to a change in a diff. This is available in the CLI and taken advantage of by some (but not all) languages/queries to avoid analysing code that isn't relevant. This is where the speedup mentioned in the blog post mainly comes from.
• For languages/queries which don't take advantage of this CLI feature, the CodeQL Action also filters out results that don't relate to the diff.

Focusing on the first aspect, this feature is implemented in the CLI, but depends on some logic in the CodeQL Action to configure it correctly. When the blog post talks about support for this coming to the CLI in a future version, I believe it means support in a way that is user-friendly. Right now, that has not been worked on as far as I know. The reasoning for why this hasn't been done yet is that you'd generally only use the CLI directly to analyse whole projects, not routinely analyse changes to them to the point that speed is particularly important.

Does this answer your question?