Search examples

Below are examples that search repositories on Sourcegraph.com, our open source code search solution for GitHub and GitLab. You can copy and adapt the following search queries for use on your company’s private instance.

See search query syntax reference.

• Recent security-related changes on all branches
  type:diff repo:@*refs/heads/ after:"5 days ago" \b(auth[^o][^r]|security\b|cve|password|secure|unsafe|perms|permissions)

• Admitted hacks and TODOs in app code
  -file:\.(json|md|txt)$ hack|todo|kludge|fixme

• New usages of a function
  type:diff after:"1 week ago" \.subscribe\( lang:typescript

• Recent quality related changes on all branches (customize for your linters)
  repo:@*refs/heads/:^master type:diff after:"1 week ago" (eslint-disable)

• Recent dependency changes
  file:package.json type:diff after:"1 week ago"

When to use regex search mode

Sourcegraph's default literal search mode is line-based and will not match across lines, so regex can be useful when you wish to do so:

• Matching multiple text strings in a file
  repo:^github\.com/Parsely/pykafka$ Not leader for partition

Regex searches are also useful when searching boundaries that are not delimited by code structures:

• Finding css classes with word boundary regex
  repo:^github\.com/sourcegraph/sourcegraph$ \bbtn-secondary\b

When to use structural search mode

Use structural search when you want to match code boundaries such as () or {}:

• Finding try catch statements with varying content
  repo:^github\.com/sourcegraph/sourcegraph$ try { :[matched_statements] } catch { :[matched_catch] }