gobuster
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CLI cyber tool for brute-forcing directories, DNS subdomains, virtual hosts, cloud buckets, and fuzzing using wordlists.
gobuster dir -u https://target.example.com -w /usr/share/wordlists/dirb/common.txt --interface eth1 gobuster dns -d example.com -w /usr/share/wordlists/subdomains.txt -r 8.8.8.8 --tcp gobuster dir -u http://example.com -w words.txt --wordlist-offset 500 gobuster dir -u http://example.com/admin -w words.txt --exclude-length 200,404-499 gobuster dns -d example.com -w subdomains.txt --no-fqdn
Summary
gobuster is an open-source command-line brute-forcing tool, written in Go and released under Apache 2.0, that discovers content a target doesn't advertise: web directories and files, DNS subdomains, virtual hosts, and open S3 or GCS buckets, plus TFTPTFTPTrivial File Transfer Protocol, a minimal UDP-based file transfer protocol standardized in RFC 1350, used by cyber tools when simplicity and low overhead matter more than authentication or error recovery. file discovery and general-purpose fuzzing. It's installed via go install, a prebuilt binary, or Docker, and run directly against a target with a wordlist, which suits penetration testers and red teamers doing reconnaissance rather than teams wanting a managed scanning platform. It sits in the same space as other wordlist-driven recon utilities, covering enumeration work that might otherwise be split across separate directory-brute-force and DNS-enumeration tools. Development has been active since 2014, with 33 contributors and 92 commits in the past year, though the most recent release was almost a year ago.
CLI cyber tool for brute-forcing directories, DNS subdomains, virtual hosts, cloud buckets, and fuzzing using wordlists.
How gobuster helps
Which unlinked directories and files exist on a web server before an attacker finds them?
walks the target with a wordlist over HTTP, requesting each candidate path and reporting which ones return a live response instead of a not-found status
Which subdomains does a domain actually have beyond what's in the DNS zone file?
queries a resolver with each wordlist entry appended to the domain and lists the names that resolve, with wildcard detection to filter out false positives
Are there other sites or applications hiding behind the same IP address?
sends each wordlist entry as a Host header against the target and separates out the virtual hosts that return a distinct response from the default site
Has anyone left an S3 or GCS bucket open to the world?
tries each candidate bucket name against the cloud storage endpoint and reports which ones exist and whether they're publicly listable
Did a scan quietly miss results because the resolver or network path was down rather than because nothing was there?
scans still exit as successful even when every lookup fails from an unreachable resolver, so a clean-looking run with zero findings needs its log checked for underlying network errors before being trusted
Can a wordlist be trusted to skip the entries an operator marked for exclusion?
lines starting with a comment marker are enumerated as literal entries rather than skipped, so a list built assuming those lines are ignored will scan names it wasn't meant to
Languages
Command line
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| option | found in | since | description |
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Values are placeholders taken from each option’s declared default. Nothing is executed here — the output shown is a recording of a run that already happened.
Score card
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Shipping velocity releases a month, last 12 months
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Documentation quality release-notes rubric, 0–100
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Breaking-change discipline how rarely a release breaks users, and notice given
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Maintenance risk quiet time against its own cadence, maintainers
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Innovation & surface new capabilities, API and MCP surface
- Community health
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Contributor trend distinct committers, this year against last
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Maintainer concentration bus factor now against a year ago
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Issue backlog trend issues closed per issue opened, 12 months
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Responsiveness median time to a maintainer’s first reply
Nine scores for gobuster, each built from the releases, notes and API history this site tracks — and, on Researcher and Business, where it stands among every measured tool in its category and how that has moved.
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Blank means never measured; nothing here is a filled-in zero.
Peer standings are included with Researcher and Business. See how this tool ranks against its competitors, using data we don't publish anywhere else.
See plans →Each score is 0–100 on a published rubric, derived from data this site already shows. A dimension we cannot measure says so — it is never scored 0 and never enters a rank.
How this is scored
- Shipping velocity — releases a month over the last 12 months, on a log scale where 16 a month scores 100. Needs 3 releases in the window.
- Documentation quality — the release-notes rubric published on the analytics page, unchanged.
- Breaking-change discipline — the share of releases carrying a breaking change (none scores 100, half or more scores 0). Only projects that label breaking changes are measured: a clean record cannot be told from an unlabelled one.
- Maintenance risk — quiet time measured against the tool's own release cadence (quiet longer than 90 days and three typical gaps scores 0), plus the number of active maintainers and whether contributors are growing, where known. Higher is lower risk.
- Innovation & surface — new capabilities in the feature ledger this year, API and MCP operations added, and the share of commits that are features: the mean of whichever we hold.
- Community health (open-source tools only) — each is a direction, not a size: contributors this year against last, the bus factor now against a year ago, and issues closed per issue opened, where steady scores 50, doubled 100 and halved 0; plus the median time to a maintainer's first reply (an hour scores about 100, a month or more 0). A commercial card has no repository and carries none of the four.
- Documented delivery (commercial tools) — when a vendor's documented new capabilities have slowed against its own baseline, that counts against the overall standing as heavily as two low dimensions. Steady delivery, or too little history to judge, leaves the standing alone; it is never a sixth score.
- Open-source tools are scored on repository signals; commercial tools on their published changelog. Ranks compare tools within one category and one profile and need at least five measured peers; the overall standing needs three ranked dimensions. Best-in-breed or consolidator is a shape, not a quality, and is never scored.
Release-note detail over time
See how much detail gobuster puts in its release notes, quarter by quarter, and compare it with tracked tools in the same category. This history uses up to ten retained, reviewed notes per tool; sparse or blank older quarters may reflect that limit.
Checking release-note history…
Releases
4 entries
No entries match these filters.
- June 20251
- August 20231
- October 20222
Project health
Issue, contributor and maintainer activity in OJ/gobuster, 2023-10 – 2026-09, as of 2026-09-25. Twelve-month figures first; the trend lines run the whole window.
- Contributors 2 −2 vs prior 12 months
- Maintainers 1 +0 joined · −0 left, last 12 months
- Bus factor 1 committers behind half the commits
- Community-filed 100% of issues opened, last 12 months
- Median time to close < 1 day first maintainer reply 9.1 hours
- Open backlog 13 of 319 issues ever filed
- Issues opened / month 0 · 0 communitymaintainers
- Open backlog 13
- Contributors / month 0
- Commits / month 0
- Stars 14,140
- other 100%
Counts from the project's public repository and git history; no individuals are identified. Maintainers are the committers covering 80% of the last year's commits. how we measure this
Articles
1 article · updated Nov 4, 2026Where gobuster turns up in what others publish: how-tos, attack reports that name it, and incident write-ups. A row says why it is here and quotes where the article names it; the link goes to the publisher.
Tutorials & guides 1
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Comprehensive Guide on Gobuster Tool
Gobuster, written in Go, stands out as one of the fastest and most flexible brute-forcing tools available today.
2 more quotes
This article walks through Gobuster’s directory enumeration mode step by step against a Damn Vulnerable Web Application (DVWA) target, demonstrating every major flag a professional tester should know.
it serves as the controlled target against which every Gobuster command is executed.
Libraries its release ships
What its latest release locks, checked against known advisories.None of its release's images build from a lockfile we can read.
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