URL: /projects

---
title: "Projects"
description: "Organize audits by project for tracking and comparison"
---

Projects let you group related audits together. Each project stores its crawl history, cached pages, and audit results in a dedicated folder.

## How Projects Work

When you run an audit, squirrelscan creates a project folder to store all data:

```
~/.squirrel/projects/
├── example-com/
│   └── project.db
├── my-blog/
│   └── project.db
└── localhost-3000/
    └── project.db
```

By default, the project name is derived from the domain you're auditing. You can override this to:
- Group multiple domains under one project
- Track the same site across environments (dev, staging, prod)
- Keep separate audit histories for different purposes

## Setting the Project Name

### Via Config File

Add a `name` field to the `[project]` section in `squirrel.toml`:

```toml squirrel.toml
[project]
name = "my-website"
domains = ["example.com", "www.example.com"]
```

<Tip>
If you don't have a config file, run `squirrel init` to create one.
</Tip>

### Via Command Line

Use the `--project-name` (or `-n`) flag to override the project name for a single audit:

```bash
squirrel audit https://example.com --project-name my-website
```

This is useful for:
- One-off audits you want to keep separate
- Testing without affecting your main project history
- CI/CD pipelines where config files aren't available

## Auditing Local Development Sites

You can audit localhost and other local development servers:

```bash
# Audit your local dev server
squirrel audit http://localhost:3000

# Audit with a custom project name
squirrel audit http://localhost:3000 -n my-app-dev
```

This is useful for:
- **Pre-deploy checks** - Catch issues before they go live
- **Development workflow** - Fix SEO and accessibility issues as you build
- **CI/CD integration** - Audit preview deployments automatically

<Note>
Local audits work the same as production audits. All rules run against the local server, and results are stored in the project database for comparison.
</Note>

### Separating Dev and Production Audits

Use different project names to keep development and production audits separate:

```toml squirrel.toml
# For local development
[project]
name = "my-app-dev"
```

```bash
# For production (override via CLI)
squirrel audit https://my-app.com -n my-app-prod
```

Or use environment-specific config files:
- `squirrel.toml` - Development settings
- `squirrel.prod.toml` - Production settings

## Viewing Project Data

Project data is stored in `~/.squirrel/projects/<project-name>/`:

| File | Contents |
|------|----------|
| `project.db` | SQLite database with crawl sessions, pages, and audit results |

You can inspect the database directly or use the CLI:

```bash
# List recent audits for a project
squirrel report --list

# View a specific audit
squirrel report <audit-id>
```

## Use Cases

### Multi-Environment Tracking

Track the same site across environments:

```bash
# Development
squirrel audit http://localhost:3000 -n mysite-dev

# Staging
squirrel audit https://staging.mysite.com -n mysite-staging

# Production
squirrel audit https://mysite.com -n mysite-prod
```

### Multi-Domain Projects

Group related domains under one project:

```toml squirrel.toml
[project]
name = "company-sites"
domains = ["company.com", "blog.company.com", "docs.company.com"]
```

### Timestamped Snapshots

Create point-in-time snapshots for comparison:

```bash
squirrel audit https://example.com -n example-2024-01
squirrel audit https://example.com -n example-2024-02
```

## Project Storage Location

All projects are stored in:

```
~/.squirrel/projects/
```

Each project gets its own subdirectory with a SQLite database containing all crawl and audit data.