→ See the query syntax reference and language reference. See search examples for inspiration.
A recently published research paper from Google and a Google developer survey showed that 98% of developers consider their Sourcegraph-like internal code search tool to be critical, and developers use it on average for 5.3 sessions each day, primarily to (in order of frequency):
Sourcegraph code search helps developers perform these tasks more quickly and effectively by providing fast, advanced code search across multiple repositories. With Sourcegraph's code search, you can:
Sourcegraph provides fast, advanced code search across multiple repositories. With Sourcegraph's code search, you can:
This document is for code search users. To get code search, install Sourcegraph.
Sourcegraph code search performs full-text searches and supports both regular expression and exact queries. By default, Sourcegraph searches across all your repositories. Our search query syntax allows for advanced queries, such as searching over any branch or commit, narrowing searches by programming language or file pattern, and more.
See the query syntax and query reference documentation for a comprehensive overview of supported syntax.
Sourcegraph supports advanced code search for specifically matching patterns inside code structures, like function parameters and loop bodies.
See the structural search documentation for a detailed explanation of this search mode.
Search over commit diffs using type:diff to see how your codebase has changed over time. This is often used to find changes to particular functions, classes, or areas of the codebase when debugging.
You can also search within commit diffs on multiple branches by specifying the branches in a repo: field after the @ sign. After the @, separate Git refs with :, specify Git ref globs by prefixing them with *, and exclude commits reachable from a ref by prefixing it with ^. Diff searches can be further narrowed down with parameters that filter by author and time.
See the query syntax documentation for a comprehensive list of supported parameters.
Searching over commit messages is supported in Sourcegraph by adding type:commit to your search query. Separately, you can also use the message:"any string" parameter to filter type:diff searches for a given commit message. Commit message searches can narrowed down further with filters such as author and time.
See our query syntax documentation for a comprehensive list of supported parameters.
Searching for symbols makes it easier to find specific functions, variables, and more. Use the type:symbol filter to search for symbol results. Symbol results also appear in typeahead suggestions, so you can jump directly to symbols by name.
Saved searches let you save and describe search queries so you can easily monitor the results on an ongoing basis. You can create a saved search for anything, including diffs and commits across all branches of your repositories. Saved searches can be an early warning system for common problems in your code and a way to monitor best practices, the progress of refactors, etc.
See the saved searches documentation for instructions for setting up and configuring saved searches.
Every project and team has a different set of repositories they commonly work with and search over. Custom search scopes enable users and organizations to quickly filter their searches to predefined subsets of files and repositories. Instead of typing out the subset of repositories or files you want to search, you can save and select scopes using the search scope buttons whenever you need.
As you type a query, the menu below will contain suggestions based on the query. Use the keyboard or mouse to select a suggestion. For example, if your query is repo:foo file:\.js$ hello, the suggestions will consist of the list of files that match your query.
You can also type in the partial name of a repository or filename to quickly jump to it. For example, typing in just foo would show you a list of repositories (first) and files with names containing foo.
On a search results page, press the Stats button to view a language breakdown of all results matching the query. Each matching file is analyzed to detect its language, and line count statistics are computed as follows:
repo:): all lines (in all files) in matching repositories are counted.file: or lang:): all lines in all matching files are counted.foo): all lines that match the query are counted.Examples:
file:test and you had a single 100-line Java test file (and no other files whose name contains test), the statistics would show 100 Java lines.foo and that term appeared on 3 lines in Java files and on 1 line in a Python file, the statistics would show 3 Java lines and 1 Python line.Tip: On the statistics page, you can enter an empty query to see statistics across all repositories.
Many organizations have old versions of code running in production and need to search across all the code for a specific release.
Version contexts allow creating sets of many repositories at specific revisions. When set, a version context limits your searches and code navigation actions (with basic code intelligence) to the repositories and revisions in the context.
Your site admin can add version contexts in site configuration under the experimentalFeatures.versionContexts setting. For example:
"experimentalFeatures": { "versionContexts": [ { "name": "srcgraph 3.15", "revisions": [ { "repo": "github.com/sourcegraph/sourcegraph", "rev": "3.15" }, { "repo": "github.com/sourcegraph/src-cli", "rev": "3.11.2" } ] } ] }
To specify the default branch, you can set "rev" to "HEAD" or "".
After setting some version contexts, users can select version contexts in the dropdown to the left of the search bar.
The most common branch to search is your default branch. To speed up this common operation Sourcegraph maintains an index of the source code on your default branch. Some organizations have other branches that are regularly searched. To speed up search for those branches Sourcegraph can be configured to index up to 64 branches per repository.
Your site admin can configure indexed branches in site configuration under the experimentalFeatures.search.index.branches setting. For example:
"experimentalFeatures": { "search.index.branches": { "github.com/sourcegraph/sourcegraph": ["3.15", "develop"], "github.com/sourcegraph/src-cli": "next" } }
Indexing multiple branches will add additional resource requirements to Sourcegraph (particularly memory). The indexer will deduplicate documents between branches. So the size of your index will grow in relation to the number of unique documents. Refer to our resource estimator to estimate whether additional resources are required.
Searches scoped to specific repositories are always up-to-date. Sourcegraph automatically fetches repository contents with any user action specific to the repository and makes new commits and branches available for searching and browsing immediately.
Unscoped search results over large repository sets may trail latest default branch revisions by some interval of time. This interval is a function of the number of repositories and the computational resources devoted to search indexing.
By default, files larger than 1 MB are excluded from search results. Use the search.largeFiles keyword to specify files to be indexed and searched regardless of size.
You can exclude files and directories from search by adding the file .sourcegraph/ignore to the root directory of your repository. Sourcegraph interprets each line in the ignore file as globbing pattern. Files or directories matching those patterns will not show up in the search results.
The ignore file is tied to a commit. This means, if you committed an ignore file to a feature branch but not to your default branch, then only search results for the feature branch will be filtered while the default branch will show all results.
Example:
# .sourcegraph/ignore # lines starting with # are comments and are ignored # empty lines are ignored, too # ignore the directory node_modules/ node_modules/ # ignore the directory src/data/ src/data/ # ** matches all characters, while * matches all characters except / # ignore all JSON files **.json # ignore all JSON files at the root of the repository *.json # ignore all JSON files within the directory data/ data/**.json # ignore all data folders data/ **/data/ # ignore all files that start with numbers [0-9]*.* **/[0-9]*.*
Our syntax follows closely what is documented in
the linux documentation project.
However, we distinguish between * and **: While ** matches all characters, * matches all characters
except the path separator /.
Note that invalid globbing patterns will cause an error and searches over commits containing a broken ignore file will not return any result.
y key to expand the URL to its canonical form (with the full 40-character Git commit SHA).Sourcegraph Cloud is a public instance of Sourcegraph that lets you search inside any open-source project on GitHub. For demo purposes, you'll be prompted to narrow your query if it would search across more than 50 repositories. To lift this limitation or to search your organization's internal code, run your own Sourcegraph instance.