About searching on GitHub
You can search globally across all of GitHub, or scope your search to a particular repository or organization.
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To search globally across all of GitHub, type what you're looking for into the search field at the top of any page, and choose "Search all of GitHub".
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To search within a particular repository or organization, navigate to the repository or organization page, type what you're looking for into the search field at the top of the page, and press Enter.
Note
- You must be signed into a personal account on GitHub to search for code across all public repositories.
- GitHub Pages sites are not searchable on GitHub. However you can search the source content if it exists in the default branch of a repository, using code search. For more information, see Searching code. For more information about GitHub Pages, see About GitHub Pages
- Currently our search doesn't support exact matching.
- Whenever you are searching in code files, only the first two results in each file will be returned.
After running a search on GitHub, you can sort the results, or further refine them by clicking one of the languages in the sidebar. For more information, see Sorting search results.
GitHub search uses an ElasticSearch cluster to index projects every time a change is pushed to GitHub. Issues and pull requests are indexed when they are created or modified.
Types of searches on GitHub
You can search for the following information across all repositories you can access on GitHub.
Searching using a visual interface
In addition to the search bar, you can search GitHub using the search page (https://[hostname]/search) or advanced search page (https://[hostname]/search/advanced).
The advanced search page (https://[hostname]/search/advanced) provides a visual interface for constructing search queries. You can filter your searches by a variety of factors, such as the number of stars or number of forks a repository has. As you fill in the advanced search fields, your query will automatically be constructed in the top search bar.
Searching repositories on GitHub.com from your private enterprise environment
If you use GitHub.com or GHE.com as well as GitHub Enterprise Server, and an enterprise owner has enabled unified search, you can search across both environments at the same time from GitHub Enterprise Server. For more information, see Enabling unified search for your enterprise.
Your enterprise owner on GitHub Enterprise Server can separately enable unified search for all public repositories on GitHub.com and for private repositories owned by the organization or enterprise on GitHub.com or GHE.com that is connected to GitHub Enterprise Server through GitHub Connect.
Before you can use unified search for private repositories, you must connect your user accounts across environments. For more information, see Enabling repository search across environments.
When you search from GitHub Enterprise Server, only private repositories that you have access to and that are owned by the connected organization or enterprise account will be included in search results. Neither you nor anyone else will be able to search private repositories owned by your user account on GitHub.com or GHE.com from GitHub Enterprise Server.
To limit your search to one environment, you can use a filter option on the advanced search page (https://[hostname]/search/advanced) or you can use the environment: search prefix. To only search for content on GitHub Enterprise Server, use the search syntax environment:local. To only search for content on GitHub.com, use environment:github.