You can search for repositories on GitHub Enterprise and narrow the results using these repository search qualifiers in any combination.

You can search for repositories globally across all of GitHub Enterprise, or search for repositories within a particular organization. For more information, see "About searching on GitHub."

To include forks in the search results, you will need to add fork:true or fork:only to your query. For more information, see "Searching in forks."

Tips:

  • This article contains example searches on the GitHub.com website, but you can use the same search filters on your GitHub Enterprise instance.
  • For a list of search syntaxes that you can add to any search qualifier to further improve your results, see "Understanding the search syntax".
  • Use quotations around multi-word search terms. For example, if you want to search for issues with the label "In progress," you'd search for label:"in progress". Search is not case sensitive.

In this article:

Search by repository name, description, or contents of the README file

With the in qualifier you can restrict your search to the repository name, repository description, contents of the README file, or any combination of these. When you omit this qualifier, only the repository name and description are searched.

Qualifier Example
in:name jquery in:name matches repositories with "jquery" in their name.
in:description jquery in:name,description matches repositories with "jquery" in their name or description.
in:readme jquery in:readme matches repositories mentioning "jquery" in their README file.

Search based on the contents of a repository

You can find a repository by searching for content in its README file, using the in:readme qualifier.

Besides using in:readme, it's not possible to find repositories by searching for specific content within the repository. To search for a specific file or content within a repository, you can use the file finder or code-specific search qualifiers. For more information, see "Finding files on GitHub" and "Searching code."

Qualifier Example
in:readme octocat in:readme matches repositories mentioning "octocat" in their README file.

Search within a user's or organization's repositories

To search in all repositories owned by a certain user or organization, you can use the user or org qualifier.

Qualifier Example
user:USERNAME user:defunkt forks:>100 matches repositories from @defunkt that have more than 100 forks.
org:ORGNAME org:github matches repositories from GitHub.

Search by repository size

The size qualifier finds repositories that match a certain size (in kilobytes), using greater than, less than, and range qualifiers.

Qualifier Example
size:n size:1000 matches repositories that are 1 MB exactly.
size:>=30000 matches repositories that are at least 30 MB.
size:<50 matches repositories that are smaller than 50 KB.
size:50..120 matches repositories that are between 50 KB and 120 KB.

Search by number of forks

The forks qualifier specifies the number of forks a repository should have, using greater than, less than, and range qualifiers.

Qualifier Example
forks:n forks:5 matches repositories with only five forks.
forks:>=205 matches repositories with at least 205 forks.
forks:<90 matches repositories with fewer than 90 forks.
forks:10..20 matches repositories with 10 to 20 forks.

Search by number of stars

You can search repositories based on the number of stars a repository has, using greater than, less than, and range qualifiers

Qualifier Example
stars:n stars:500 matches repositories with exactly 500 stars.
stars:10..20 matches repositories 10 to 20 stars, that are smaller than 1000 KB.
stars:>=500 fork:true language:php matches repositories with the at least 500 stars, including forked ones, that are written in PHP.

Search by when a repository was created or last updated

You can filter repositories based on time of creation or time of last update. For repository creation, you can use the created qualifier; to find out when a repository was last updated, you'll want to use the pushed qualifier. The pushed qualifier will return a list of repositories, sorted by the most recent commit made on any branch in the repository.

Both take a date as a parameter. Date formatting must follow the ISO8601 standard, which is YYYY-MM-DD (year-month-day). You can also add optional time information THH:MM:SS+00:00 after the date, to search by the hour, minute, and second. That's T, followed by HH:MM:SS (hour-minutes-seconds), and a UTC offset (+00:00).

Dates support greater than, less than, and range qualifiers.

Qualifier Example
created:YYYY-MM-DD webos created:<2011-01-01 matches repositories with the word "webos" that were created before 2011.
pushed:YYYY-MM-DD css pushed:>2013-02-01 matches repositories with the word "css" that were pushed to after January 2013.
case pushed:>=2013-03-06 fork:only matches repositories with the word "case" that were pushed to on or after March 6th, 2013, and that are forks.

Search by language

You can search repositories based on the main language they're written in.

Qualifier Example
language:LANGUAGE rails language:javascript matches repositories with the word "rails" that are written in JavaScript.

Search by topic

You can find all of the repositories that are classified with a particular topic.

Qualifier Example
topic:TOPIC topic:jekyll matches repositories that have been classified with the topic "jekyll."

Search by number of topics

You can search repositories by the number of topics that have been applied to them, using the topics qualifier along with greater than, less than, and range qualifiers.

Qualifier Example
topics:n topics:5 matches repositories that have five topics.
topics:>3 matches repositories that have more than three topics.

Search by license

You can search repositories by their license. You must use a license keyword to filter repositories by a particular license or license family.

Qualifier Example
license:LICENSE_KEYWORD license:apache-2.0 matches repositories that are licensed under Apache License 2.0.

Search by public or private repository

You can filter your search based on whether a repository is public or private.

Qualifier Example
is:public is:public org:github matches repositories owned by GitHub that are public.
is:private is:private pages matches private repositories you have access to and that contain the word "pages."

Search based on whether a repository is a mirror

You can search repositories based on whether or not they're a mirror and are hosted elsewhere.

Qualifier Example
mirror:true mirror:true GNOME matches repositories that are mirrors and contain the word "GNOME."
mirror:false mirror:false GNOME matches repositories that are not mirrors and contain the word "GNOME."

Search based on whether a repository is archived

You can search repositories based on whether or not they're archived.

Qualifier Example
archived:true archived:true GNOME matches repositories that are archived and contain the word "GNOME."
archived:false archived:false GNOME matches repositories that are not archived and contain the word "GNOME."

Further reading