About searching on GitHub

You can search globally across all of GitHub Enterprise, or scope your search to a particular repository or organization.

• To search globally across all of GitHub Enterprise, type what you're looking for into the search field at the top of any page, and choose "All GitHub" in the search drop-down menu.
• 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.

After running a search on GitHub Enterprise, 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 Enterprise search uses an ElasticSearch cluster to index projects every time a change is pushed to GitHub Enterprise. Issues and pull requests are indexed when they are created or modified.

Types of searches on GitHub

You can search the following types of information across all public GitHub Enterprise repositories, and all private GitHub Enterprise repositories you have access to:

• Repositories
• Topics
• Issues and pull requests
• Code
• Commits
• Users
• Wikis

Searching using a visual interface

Alternatively, you can search GitHub Enterprise 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 across GitHub Enterprise and GitHub.com simultaneously

If you use GitHub Enterprise and you're a member of a GitHub.com organization using GitHub Enterprise Cloud, your GitHub Enterprise site administrator can enable GitHub Connect so that you can search across both environments at the same time. For more information, see "Enabling unified search between GitHub Enterprise and GitHub.com."

You can only search across both environments from GitHub Enterprise. To scope your search by 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, use the search syntax environment:local. To only search for content on GitHub.com, use environment:github.

Your GitHub Enterprise site administrator can enable unified search for all public repositories, all private repositories, or only certain private repositories in the connected GitHub Enterprise Cloud organization.

If your site administrator enables unified search in private repositories, you can only search in the private repositories that the administrator enabled unified search for and that you have access to in the connected GitHub.com organization. Your GitHub Enterprise administrators and organization owners on GitHub.com cannot search private repositories owned by your account. To search the applicable private repositories, you must enable private repository search for your personal accounts on GitHub.com and GitHub Enterprise. For more information, see "Enabling private GitHub.com repository search in your GitHub Enterprise account."

Further reading

• "Understanding the search syntax"
• "Searching on GitHub"