Nuclei templates not installing?

[pantelis-karamolegkos]

Is there an existing issue for this?

• I have searched the existing issues.

Current Behavior

I am on a MacOS

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

go: downloading github.com/projectdiscovery/nuclei v1.1.7
go: downloading github.com/projectdiscovery/nuclei/v3 v3.4.10
go: downloading github.com/projectdiscovery/goflags v0.1.74
go: downloading github.com/projectdiscovery/gologger v1.1.54
go: downloading github.com/projectdiscovery/interactsh v1.2.4
go: downloading github.com/projectdiscovery/utils v0.4.23
go: downloading github.com/rs/xid v1.6.0
.
.
.

$ nuclei -update-templates

                     __     _
   ____  __  _______/ /__  (_)
  / __ \/ / / / ___/ / _ \/ /
 / / / / /_/ / /__/ /  __/ /
/_/ /_/\__,_/\___/_/\___/_/   v3.4.10

		projectdiscovery.io

nuclei -target https://example.com

                     __     _
   ____  __  _______/ /__  (_)
  / __ \/ / / / ___/ / _ \/ /
 / / / / /_/ / /__/ /  __/ /
/_/ /_/\__,_/\___/_/\___/_/   v3.4.10

		projectdiscovery.io

[ERR] Could not find template '/Users/myusername/nuclei-templates': no templates found in path /Users/myusername/nuclei-templates
[INF] Current nuclei version: v3.4.10 (latest)
[INF] Current nuclei-templates version:  (outdated)
[INF] Targets loaded for current scan: 1
[INF] Scan completed in 1.019916ms. No results found.
[FTL] Could not run nuclei: no templates provided for scan

Where are the templates?

Expected Behavior

Nuclei templates should have been installed

Steps To Reproduce

$ nuclei -target https://example.com

Environment

- OS: MacOS 15.6.1
- Nuclei: v3.4.10
- Go: go1.25.1 darwin/arm64

Anything else?

In my /Users/myusername/Library/Application Support/nuclei/.templates-config.json

{
    "nuclei-templates-directory": "/Users/myusername/nuclei-templates",
    "custom-s3-templates-directory": "/Users/myusername/nuclei-templates/s3",
    "custom-github-templates-directory": "/Users/myusername/nuclei-templates/github",
    "custom-gitlab-templates-directory": "/Users/myusername/nuclei-templates/gitlab",
    "custom-azure-templates-directory": "/Users/myusername/nuclei-templates/azure",
    "nuclei-ignore-hash": "54fa34605b18f2f8f8c4ca885f6dc529",
    "nuclei-latest-version": "v3.4.10",
    "nuclei-templates-latest-version": "v10.3.1",
    "nuclei-latest-ignore-hash": "54fa34605b18f2f8f8c4ca885f6dc529"
}

However

$ ls  /Users/myusername/nuclei-templates

[adysec]

It looks like Nuclei isn’t automatically downloading templates in your setup. You can manually fetch them with:

nuclei -update-templates -t /Users/myusername/nuclei-templates

Then check that the templates exist in that directory. Also make sure the nuclei-templates-directory in .templates-config.json matches the path where templates are actually downloaded. MacOS sometimes requires explicit permission for Nuclei to write to /Users/myusername/nuclei-templates.