How to search code with Sourcegraph — a cheat sheet
Sourcegraph is a universal code search tool, enabling you to search across both open source and your own private code repositories. Code search can help you onboard onto new codebases, contribute to open source, find bugs and error messages, understand dependency libraries, and more. You can use these commands on your own Sourcegraph instance, or try them out on Sourcegraph.com to search our index of open source repositories.
This cheat sheet style guide can help you get up to speed with Sourcegraph commands quickly. For more thorough tutorials on using Sourcegraph, refer to our documentation.
You can use these commands on either Sourcegraph.com or your own Sourcegraph instance.
Searching an organization’s repository
By default, Sourcegraph lets you search globally, providing you with results from all the repositories you have access to. This includes all currently indexed open source repositories. The repo
command lets you dial down to the single repository level.
Searching for or within a repository
The repo
keyword lets you search a specific repository in your organization or on the web.
Searching with repo:^github\.com/ORGANIZATION
will return all repositories in a given organization, where ORGANIZATION
can be sourcegraph
, for example.
The repo
keyword contextualizes the searches you perform on Sourcegraph.
Repository search: command chaining
When searching a repository, command chaining can be used to return more specific results depending on the expected results.
Search for a repository that contains a file
If you are searching for a file or a file path in a repository, use repo:has.path
.
For example, when searching for the package.json
file in a project, this search query will return the file.
Alternatively, you can use repo:has.file
, which allows you to search for files containing content.
This query returns repositories that contain a package.json
file containing the string tsconfig
.
Search for a repository that contains some content
Suppose you are searching for some content in a repository, such as a library. Use repo:has.content
.
We can search for the mdi-react
library in Sourcegraph, for example:
The above query returns repos that have mdi-react
among its contents.
Language-specific search
Use lang
when searching code to narrow the scope of your search to one programming language.
We can search for results within the C++ or Python programming languages.
By default, searches are case insensitive.
Prepending a hyphen can exclude results from a particular programming language.
To exclude Java, you can perform the following search.
Narrowing your search scope down to specific languages can ensure that you find the code that is most relevant to your needs.
Searching based on time periods
If you are searching for code committed before or after a time period, you will use before
and after
Sometimes the time period can be relative, like last week
, last year
, 3 months ago
or absolute, in several formats including {month} {day} {year}
(example: february 10 2021
), dd/mm/yyyy
, and ISO format yyyy-mm-dd
.
To search between dates, keywords like and
can be combined with before
or after
to return dates within a given period.
Time-based search is usually used along with other search commands to further narrow down search results.
Note that before
and after
only work in conjunction when combined with type:diff
or type:commit
commands.
Search in archived repositories
The archived
keyword will bring up those results from repositories that have been archived.
We can surface only archived repositories within the Sourcegraph organization with the following query.
This can help us understand past decisions made within a given codebase.
Case sensitive search
Use yes
or no
with the case
search query to specify if the search should be case sensitive or not. By default, searches are case insensitive.
Suppose you would like to check to align the style of a given codebase to help you bring all function calls in Python to be consistent with the PEP 8 guidance. You can use Sourcegraph to understand which functions are using camelCase rather than lowercase names with underscores between words (also called snake_case).
If you would like to find all declared functions that use camelCase, you can try combining this query with regular expressions.
Searching by types
Types define the scope of code search. A search scope consists of commits, diffs, symbols, repos, paths and files. It is typically used alongside other search commands to further narrow search results.
Here is an example to show us time-based commits on the Sourcegraph repo.
A type
scope can use the following commands, which will restrict search to the following:
commit
— commits to a repository.path
— restricts terms to matching filenames only (not file contents).diff
— show diffs, or changes, within a repository.repo
— repositories available to you.file
— restricts terms to matching file contents only (not filenames).symbol
— returns files that contain names or keywords in a library.
Searching by type can help you find exactly what you need in a codebase by narrowing down the scope of your search.
Searching commit messages matching a string
If a commit message is known, it can be helpful to use the message
keyword to bring up relevant commits.