Search-based code intelligence

Sourcegraph comes with built-in code intelligence provided by search-based heuristics.

If you are interested in enabling precise code intelligence for your repository, see our how-to guides.

How does it work?

Search-based code intelligence is able to provide 3 core code intelligence features:

  • Jump to definition: it performs a symbol search
  • Hover documentation: it first finds the definition then extracts documentation from comments near the definition
  • Find references: it performs a case-sensitive word-boundary cross-repository plain text search for the given symbol

Search-based code intelligence also filters results by file extension and by imports at the top of the file for some languages.

What languages are supported?

Search-based code intelligence supports all of the most popular programming languages.

Are you using a language we don't support? File a GitHub issue or submit a PR.

Why are my results sometimes incorrect?

Search-based code intelligence uses search-based heuristics, rather than parsing the code into an abstract syntax tree (AST). Incorrect results occur more often for tokens with common names (such as Get) than for tokens with more unique names simply because those tokens appear more often in the search index.

If you require 100% confidence in accuracy for a definition or reference results for a symbol you hovered over we recommend utilizing precise code intelligence. Scenarios where you may still get search-based code intelligence results even with precision on are described in more detail in the precise code intelligence docs.

Why does it sometimes time out?

The symbol search performance section describes query paths and performance. Consider using Rockskip if you're experiencing frequent timeouts.

What configuration settings can I apply?

The symbols container recognizes these environment variables:

  • CTAGS_COMMAND: defaults to universal-ctags, ctags command (should point to universal-ctags executable compiled with JSON and seccomp support)
  • CTAGS_PATTERN_LENGTH_LIMIT: defaults to 250, the maximum length of the patterns output by ctags
  • LOG_CTAGS_ERRORS: defaults to false, log ctags errors
  • SANITY_CHECK: defaults to false, check that go-sqlite3 works then exit 0 if it's ok or 1 if not
  • CACHE_DIR: defaults to /tmp/symbols-cache, directory in which to store cached symbols
  • SYMBOLS_CACHE_SIZE_MB: defaults to 100000, maximum size of the disk cache (in megabytes)
  • CTAGS_PROCESSES: defaults to strconv.Itoa(runtime.GOMAXPROCS(0)), number of concurrent parser processes to run
  • REQUEST_BUFFER_SIZE: defaults to 8192, maximum size of buffered parser request channel
  • PROCESSING_TIMEOUT: defaults to 2h, maximum time to spend processing a repository
  • MAX_TOTAL_PATHS_LENGTH: defaults to 100000, maximum sum of lengths of all paths in a single call to git archive
  • USE_ROCKSKIP: defaults to false, enables Rockskip for fast symbol searches and search-based code intelligence on big repositories specified in ROCKSKIP_REPOS
  • ROCKSKIP_REPOS: no default, in combination with USE_ROCKSKIP=true this specifies a comma separated list of repositories to index using Rockskip (e.g. github.com/torvalds/linux,github.com/pallets/flask)
  • MAX_CONCURRENTLY_INDEXING: defaults to 4, maximum number of repositories being indexed at a time by Rockskip (also limits ctags processes)

The defaults come from config.go.