Disclaimer: The information provided in this article is just for an educational and informational purposes only. The intent behind discussing hacking techniques, tools, and concepts is not to encourage or endorse any illegal activities.

What is Nuclei?

Nuclei is a powerful open-source vulnerability scanner built in Go language. It is used for detection and mitigation of vulnerabilities in modern applications, infrastructure and cloud platforms.

Nuclei works by using templates. These templates are written in simple YAML format and they define the function of the template like how to detect specific vulnerabilities, rank them by severity and how to address those vulnerabilities.

It has a collection of 8000+ templates are used in different scenarios for detection of various kinds of security flaws. It also provides flexible customization of templates to fulfill your specific use cases and ensures highly targeted scans that focus on most relevant security checks.

Nuclei AI

In February 2025, they introduced Nuclei AI where you can use -ai argument to inject Natural Language Prompts directly into CLI, which enables automatic generation and execution of vulnerability detection templates.

Let’s directly jump into installation part.

Installation:

Nuclei Project Link:

Note: Before we start installation process you need to have go installed in your PC, as Nuclei is built in Golang and requires it to compile and run the tool.

Step 1: Open your terminal and execute the following command to install.

go install -v github.com/projectdiscovery/nuclei/v3/cmd/nuclei@latest

Step 2: Confirm that Nuclei is successfully installed on your PC.

nuclei -version

Step 3: Now, to use -ai flag you need to have an API key. So to get that, go to this link and signup here: https://cloud.projectdiscovery.io

After successful signup you can get your API key from Settings > API Key (in the General section). Now copy that API key.

Step 4: Run the command below to authenticate your account. Then it will ask you for the API key. Paste that copied API key and hit enter.

nuclei -auth

Now, you can use the -ai flag to generate new templates with Natural Language Prompts.

Example 1: Extracting endpoints from the page response

nuclei -u "https://github.com" -ai "extract all the endpoints from this page response"

Output:

Example 2: Extracting API keys from the page response

nuclei -list target.txt -ai "extract the api key from page response"