You can search globally across all of GitHub Enterprise Server, or scope your search to a particular repository or organization.
- To search globally across all of GitHub Enterprise Server, 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.
Notes:
- You must be signed into a user account on GitHub Enterprise Server to search for code across all public repositories.
- GitHub Pages sites are not searchable on GitHub Enterprise Server. 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 "What is 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 Enterprise Server, 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 Server search uses an ElasticSearch cluster to index projects every time a change is pushed to GitHub Enterprise Server. 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 your GitHub Enterprise Server instance.
Searching using a visual interface
You can search GitHub Enterprise Server 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 Enterprise Server and you're a member of a GitHub.com organization using GitHub Enterprise Cloud, an enterprise owner for your GitHub Enterprise environment can enable GitHub Connect so that you can search across both environments at the same time from GitHub Enterprise Server. For more information, see the following.
- "Enabling unified search for your enterprise" in the GitHub Enterprise Server documentation
- "Enabling unified search for your enterprise" in the GitHub AE documentation
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 Server, use the search syntax environment:local. To only search for content on GitHub.com, use environment:github.
Your enterprise owner on GitHub Enterprise Server can enable unified search for all public repositories, all private repositories, or only certain private repositories in the connected GitHub Enterprise Cloud organization.
When you search from GitHub Enterprise Server, you can only search in the private repositories that you have access to in the connected GitHub.com organization. Enterprise owners for GitHub Enterprise Server and organization owners on GitHub.com cannot search private repositories owned by your account on GitHub.com. To search the applicable private repositories, you must enable private repository search for your personal accounts on GitHub Enterprise Server. For more information, see "Enabling GitHub.com repository search from your private enterprise environment."