Finding files on GitHub

You can search for a file in a repository using the file finder. To search for a file in multiple repositories on GitHub Enterprise Server, use the filename code search qualifier.

In this article

Tips:

  • By default, file finder results exclude some directories like build, log, tmp, and vendor. To search for files in these directories, use the filename code search qualifier. Alternatively, you can customize which directories are excluded by default using a .gitattributes file.
  • You can also open the file finder by pressing t on your keyboard. For more information, see "Keyboard shortcuts."

Using the file finder

  1. On GitHub, navigate to the main page of the repository.
  2. Above the list of files, click Go to file.
    Screenshot of a row of buttons on the main page of a repository. The "Go to file" button is outlined in dark orange.
  3. In the search field, type the name of the file you'd like to find.
    Screenshot of the search bar for finding a file in a repository. The search bar contains the term "readme" and under the search bar is a link to the file that is the result of the search, "README.md". The search bar is outlined in dark orange.
  4. In the list of results, click the file you wanted to find.

Customizing excluded files

By default, file finder results do not include files in the following directories if they exist at your repository root:

  • .git
  • .hg
  • .sass-cache
  • .svn
  • build
  • dot_git
  • log
  • tmp
  • vendor

You can override these default exclusions using a .gitattributes file.

To do this, create or update a file called .gitattributes in your repository root, setting the linguist-generated attribute to false for each directory that should be included in file finder results.

For example, the following .gitattributes file would cause files in the build/ directory to be available to the file finder:

build/** linguist-generated=false

Note that this override requires the use of the recursive glob pattern (**). For more information, see "pattern format" in the Git documentation. More complex overrides of subdirectories within excluded-by-default directories are not supported.

Further reading