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What Are Scope Directives?

Scope directives are instructions that determine what parts of the web application should be crawled or scanned.

Version Number: v1.0.0

Published Date: 26 Aug 2025

The function should be considered a BETA function as it has not been generally released and access to this functionality is available via request only.

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Depending on the action of the scope directive, they can take affect during either crawling or scanning. Crawling is the discovery phase where our scanners search through your web app and discover URLs. Scanning is the testing phase where our scanners perform vulnerability testing on the URLs in-scope for testing. There is also a targeting phase which sits between these two which allows you to review the sitemap generated in the crawling phase and edit your scope directives to control what is in-scope for the scan.

Configuration options for scope directives are described in more detail below.

Action

The action dictates whether the matching URLs will be in-scope for scanning. The supported actions are as follows:

Exclude

The exclude action prevents matching URLs from being scanned during the scanning phase. It has no effect on crawling. 

Exclude and Sample

This action includes a sample of the matching URLs in the scope, and discards the remainder. It supports the following additional options:

  • Mode: The sampling mode.
  • Count: The number of URLs to sample and scan.

The sampling mode can be one of First, Last, Deterministic, and Random. In First mode, the first URLs discovered during crawling are included. Last mode is the opposite, with the last URLs discovered during crawling being included. Deterministic mode is randomised, but it ensures that if the same set of URLs are matched from scan to scan, the same URLs will be sampled to include in scanning. Random mode is completely randomised every time we scan.

A common use case for this action is for a web application that has a lot of repetitive, static content. In this case there is little value in scanning every near-identical page, but sampling a few of the pages will still ensure that good coverage is maintained.

This action has no effect on crawling.

Seed

The seed action describes other URLs that should be used as a starting point for crawling. This action can ensure that an isolated part of the web application (i.e. a part that is not directly linked to from the root URL), is included in scope for testing.

This action takes effect during crawling, and has no direct effect during the scanning phase. However URLs that are added to the scope due to a Seed directive will potentially be in scope for scanning, depending on the other scope directives present.

Note that this action only supports the Exact and Prefix value types.

Value / Value Type

The value and value type options dictate URLs a scope directive will match. Value type determines how the value should be interpreted. The possible value types are explained below, along with how the corresponding value is interpreted in each case.

Exact

The Exact value type matches URLs exactly based on the value.

For example:

https://live.edgescan.com/app will only match https://live.edgescan.com/app

Prefix

The prefix value type matches URLs which begin with the value.

For example:

https://live.edgescan.com/app will match https://live.edgescan.com/app/assets and https://live.edgescan.com/app/users

Regex

The regex value type matches URLs which match the provided regex value.

For example:

/(html)/ will match https://live.edgescan.com/app.html and https://live.edgescan.com/assets.html

HTTP Method

The HTTP Method option dictates which HTTP methods are matched by the directive. You can select one of the standard HTTP methods, or the special value ALL which will match any HTTP method. It can also be inverted to match all but the selected HTTP method.