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Keyword search

Use the Code Search functionality to search for a given keyword in your codebase. If you are viewing a specific repo, the search queries the current repo. If you search at the project level (from the Repositories list), the search queries all repos in the current project.

Search syntax and filters​

In addition to keyword strings, you can use query syntax and filters to refine your search.

Match exact string​

Wrap your keyword string in quotation marks to query exact string matches. For example, searching yarn install returns results containing both keywords anywhere (not necessarily adjacent to each other); whereas, searching "yarn install" returns only results containing that exact phrase in the specified order.

Boolean operators​

Use Boolean operators and, or, and not to create more inclusive, exclusive, or complex queries.

  • And: Any plain keyword phrase is treated as and. Don't explicitly declare 'and' in your query. For example, yarn install is interpreted as yarn and install.
  • Not: You can use not or a hyphen/minus sign (-). For example, yarn -install is the same as yarn not install.
  • Or: Use or, such as yarn or bundle.

If searching for the literal words or or not, wrap your keywords in quotation marks to distinguish them from the Boolean operators. For example, "if not" or "if else".

Case sensitivity​

By default, keyword search is case insensitive. If you want to enable case sensitivity, include case:yes. For example, class Button case:yes searches for files containing class and Button with case sensitivity.

Special characters​

Search engines and regex use certain characters to trigger specific query functionality, such as asterisks for wildcards. If your keyword strings contain these characters, you must escape them with backslash (\) so the search interprets them literally as part of your search phrase.

Special characters requiring escaping include those common to search engines or regex, such as asterisks, colons, single and double quotation marks, parenthesis, curly braces, brackets, ampersands, question marks, hyphens/minus signs, and so on.

For example, if you want to search for the literal string "feedback" with the quotation marks, then you need to escape the quotation marks as \"feedback\". Without escaping, your query is treated as exact string matching, and your results include any instance of the word feedback with or without punctuation around it.

To limit your search to a specific source code language, you can use the Language search results filter or the lang:LANGUAGE query syntax. For example, build lang:go returns results for the keyword build in Go files.

Use file:KEYWORD to search for a keyword in file names. For example, file:README returns results for file names containing README.

If you start a search within a specific repository, your search is automatically scoped to the current repo.

If you search at the project level (from the Repositories list), you can use the Repository search results filter to limit results to a specific repo in the current project.

You can only search repos that you can access.

Currently, keyword search can't search across an entire organization or account at once.

Simple regex​

Keyword search has some support for simple regex, but more complex expressions might not function as expected.

Search results​

Search results can include matches in code, file names, and file paths. Currently, keyword search doesn't include non-code entities (such as PRs, tags, and branches).

Matches in a file name or file path display the full file path with the matching portion highlighted.

Matches in your code (within a file) display the file path and up to 25 matching code snippets per file.

Select a search result to go to the Files page for the selected file.

Search results filters​

Depending on your query and search context, you can filter search results by repository, file path, or language. The repository filter is limited to repositories that you can access.