Search code

Find file contents via various criteria. This method returns up to 100 results per page.

When searching for code, you can get text match metadata for the file content and file path fields when you pass the text-match media type. For more details about how to receive highlighted search results, see Text match metadata.

GET /search/code

Note: You must authenticate to search for code across all public repositories.

Considerations for code search

Due to the complexity of searching code, there are a few restrictions on how searches are performed:

Only the default branch is considered. In most cases, this will be the master branch.
Only files smaller than 384 KB are searchable.
You must always include at least one search term when searching source code. For example, searching for language:go is not valid, while amazing language:go is.

Parameters

Name	Type	Description
`q`	`string`	Required. The query contains one or more search keywords and qualifiers. Qualifiers allow you to limit your search to specific areas of GitHub. The REST API supports the same qualifiers as GitHub.com. To learn more about the format of the query, see Constructing a search query. See "Searching code" for a detailed list of qualifiers.
`sort`	`string`	Sorts the results of your query. Can only be `indexed`, which indicates how recently a file has been indexed by the GitHub search infrastructure. Default: best match
`order`	`string`	Determines whether the first search result returned is the highest number of matches (`desc`) or lowest number of matches (`asc`). This parameter is ignored unless you provide `sort`. Default: `desc`

Example

Suppose you want to find the definition of the addClass function inside jQuery. Your query would look something like this:

curl https://api.github.com/search/code?q=addClass+in:file+language:js+repo:jquery/jquery

Here, we're searching for the keyword addClass within a file's contents. We're making sure that we're only looking in files where the language is JavaScript. And we're scoping the search to the repo:jquery/jquery repository.

Status: 200 OK
Link: <https://api.github.com/resource?page=2>; rel="next",
      <https://api.github.com/resource?page=5>; rel="last"
X-RateLimit-Limit: 20
X-RateLimit-Remaining: 19

{
  "total_count": 7,
  "incomplete_results": false,
  "items": [
    {
      "name": "classes.js",
      "path": "src/attributes/classes.js",
      "sha": "d7212f9dee2dcc18f084d7df8f417b80846ded5a",
      "url": "https://api.github.com/repositories/167174/contents/src/attributes/classes.js?ref=825ac3773694e0cd23ee74895fd5aeb535b27da4",
      "git_url": "https://api.github.com/repositories/167174/git/blobs/d7212f9dee2dcc18f084d7df8f417b80846ded5a",
      "html_url": "https://github.com/jquery/jquery/blob/825ac3773694e0cd23ee74895fd5aeb535b27da4/src/attributes/classes.js",
      "repository": {
        "id": 167174,
        "node_id": "MDEwOlJlcG9zaXRvcnkxNjcxNzQ=",
        "name": "jquery",
        "full_name": "jquery/jquery",
        "owner": {
          "login": "jquery",
          "id": 70142,
          "node_id": "MDQ6VXNlcjcwMTQy",
          "avatar_url": "https://0.gravatar.com/avatar/6906f317a4733f4379b06c32229ef02f?d=https%3A%2F%2Fidenticons.github.com%2Ff426f04f2f9813718fb806b30e0093de.png",
          "gravatar_id": "",
          "url": "https://api.github.com/users/jquery",
          "html_url": "https://github.com/jquery",
          "followers_url": "https://api.github.com/users/jquery/followers",
          "following_url": "https://api.github.com/users/jquery/following{/other_user}",
          "gists_url": "https://api.github.com/users/jquery/gists{/gist_id}",
          "starred_url": "https://api.github.com/users/jquery/starred{/owner}{/repo}",
          "subscriptions_url": "https://api.github.com/users/jquery/subscriptions",
          "organizations_url": "https://api.github.com/users/jquery/orgs",
          "repos_url": "https://api.github.com/users/jquery/repos",
          "events_url": "https://api.github.com/users/jquery/events{/privacy}",
          "received_events_url": "https://api.github.com/users/jquery/received_events",
          "type": "Organization",
          "site_admin": false
        },
        "private": false,
        "html_url": "https://github.com/jquery/jquery",
        "description": "jQuery JavaScript Library",
        "fork": false,
        "url": "https://api.github.com/repos/jquery/jquery",
        "forks_url": "https://api.github.com/repos/jquery/jquery/forks",
        "keys_url": "https://api.github.com/repos/jquery/jquery/keys{/key_id}",
        "collaborators_url": "https://api.github.com/repos/jquery/jquery/collaborators{/collaborator}",
        "teams_url": "https://api.github.com/repos/jquery/jquery/teams",
        "hooks_url": "https://api.github.com/repos/jquery/jquery/hooks",
        "issue_events_url": "https://api.github.com/repos/jquery/jquery/issues/events{/number}",
        "events_url": "https://api.github.com/repos/jquery/jquery/events",
        "assignees_url": "https://api.github.com/repos/jquery/jquery/assignees{/user}",
        "branches_url": "https://api.github.com/repos/jquery/jquery/branches{/branch}",
        "tags_url": "https://api.github.com/repos/jquery/jquery/tags",
        "blobs_url": "https://api.github.com/repos/jquery/jquery/git/blobs{/sha}",
        "git_tags_url": "https://api.github.com/repos/jquery/jquery/git/tags{/sha}",
        "git_refs_url": "https://api.github.com/repos/jquery/jquery/git/refs{/sha}",
        "trees_url": "https://api.github.com/repos/jquery/jquery/git/trees{/sha}",
        "statuses_url": "https://api.github.com/repos/jquery/jquery/statuses/{sha}",
        "languages_url": "https://api.github.com/repos/jquery/jquery/languages",
        "stargazers_url": "https://api.github.com/repos/jquery/jquery/stargazers",
        "contributors_url": "https://api.github.com/repos/jquery/jquery/contributors",
        "subscribers_url": "https://api.github.com/repos/jquery/jquery/subscribers",
        "subscription_url": "https://api.github.com/repos/jquery/jquery/subscription",
        "commits_url": "https://api.github.com/repos/jquery/jquery/commits{/sha}",
        "git_commits_url": "https://api.github.com/repos/jquery/jquery/git/commits{/sha}",
        "comments_url": "https://api.github.com/repos/jquery/jquery/comments{/number}",
        "issue_comment_url": "https://api.github.com/repos/jquery/jquery/issues/comments/{number}",
        "contents_url": "https://api.github.com/repos/jquery/jquery/contents/{+path}",
        "compare_url": "https://api.github.com/repos/jquery/jquery/compare/{base}...{head}",
        "merges_url": "https://api.github.com/repos/jquery/jquery/merges",
        "archive_url": "https://api.github.com/repos/jquery/jquery/{archive_format}{/ref}",
        "downloads_url": "https://api.github.com/repos/jquery/jquery/downloads",
        "issues_url": "https://api.github.com/repos/jquery/jquery/issues{/number}",
        "pulls_url": "https://api.github.com/repos/jquery/jquery/pulls{/number}",
        "milestones_url": "https://api.github.com/repos/jquery/jquery/milestones{/number}",
        "notifications_url": "https://api.github.com/repos/jquery/jquery/notifications{?since,all,participating}",
        "labels_url": "https://api.github.com/repos/jquery/jquery/labels{/name}"
      },
      "score": 1.0
    }
  ]
}