https://github.com/sourcegraph/zoekt
Fast trigram based code search
https://github.com/sourcegraph/zoekt
repo-type-backend
Last synced: about 1 month ago
JSON representation
Fast trigram based code search
- Host: GitHub
- URL: https://github.com/sourcegraph/zoekt
- Owner: sourcegraph
- License: apache-2.0
- Created: 2018-10-01T20:58:06.000Z (over 6 years ago)
- Default Branch: main
- Last Pushed: 2025-03-25T16:34:04.000Z (about 1 month ago)
- Last Synced: 2025-03-28T02:48:26.010Z (about 1 month ago)
- Topics: repo-type-backend
- Language: Go
- Homepage:
- Size: 14.7 MB
- Stars: 877
- Watchers: 58
- Forks: 114
- Open Issues: 21
-
Metadata Files:
- Readme: README.md
- Contributing: CONTRIBUTING.md
- License: LICENSE
- Security: SECURITY.md
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README
# Zoekt: fast code search
"Zoekt, en gij zult spinazie eten" - Jan Eertink
("seek, and ye shall eat spinach" - My primary school teacher)
Zoekt is a text search engine intended for use with source
code. (Pronunciation: roughly as you would pronounce "zooked" in English)
**Note:** This has been the maintained source for Zoekt since 2017, when it was forked from the
original repository [github.com/google/zoekt](https://github.com/google/zoekt).
## Background
Zoekt supports fast substring and regexp matching on source code, with a rich query language
that includes boolean operators (and, or, not). It can search individual repositories, and search
across many repositories in a large codebase. Zoekt ranks search results using a combination of code-related signals
like whether the match is on a symbol. Because of its general design based on trigram indexing and syntactic
parsing, it works well for a variety of programming languages.
The two main ways to use the project are
* Through individual commands, to index repositories and perform searches through Zoekt's [query language](doc/query_syntax.md)
* Or, through the indexserver and webserver, which support syncing repositories from a code host and searching them through a web UI or API
For more details on Zoekt's design, see the [docs directory](doc/).
## Usage
### Installation
go get github.com/sourcegraph/zoekt/
**Note**: It is also recommended to install [Universal ctags](https://github.com/universal-ctags/ctags), as symbol
information is a key signal in ranking search results. See [ctags.md](doc/ctags.md) for more information.
### Command-based usage
Zoekt supports indexing and searching repositories on the command line. This is most helpful
for simple local usage, or for testing and development.
#### Indexing a local git repo
go install github.com/sourcegraph/zoekt/cmd/zoekt-git-index
$GOPATH/bin/zoekt-git-index -index ~/.zoekt /path/to/repo
#### Indexing a local directory (not git-specific)
go install github.com/sourcegraph/zoekt/cmd/zoekt-index
$GOPATH/bin/zoekt-index -index ~/.zoekt /path/to/repo
#### Searching an index
go install github.com/sourcegraph/zoekt/cmd/zoekt
$GOPATH/bin/zoekt 'hello'
$GOPATH/bin/zoekt 'hello file:README'
### Zoekt services
Zoekt also contains an index server and web server to support larger-scale indexing and searching
of remote repositories. The index server can be configured to periodically fetch and reindex repositories
from a code host. The webserver can be configured to serve search results through a web UI or API.
#### Indexing a GitHub organization
go install github.com/sourcegraph/zoekt/cmd/zoekt-indexserver
echo YOUR_GITHUB_TOKEN_HERE > token.txt
echo '[{"GitHubOrg": "apache", "CredentialPath": "token.txt"}]' > config.json
$GOPATH/bin/zoekt-indexserver -mirror_config config.json -data_dir ~/.zoekt/
This will fetch all repos under 'github.com/apache', then index the repositories. The indexserver takes care of
periodically fetching and indexing new data, and cleaning up logfiles. See [config.go](cmd/zoekt-indexserver/config.go)
for more details on this configuration.
#### Starting the web server
go install github.com/sourcegraph/zoekt/cmd/zoekt-webserver
$GOPATH/bin/zoekt-webserver -index ~/.zoekt/
This will start a web server with a simple search UI at http://localhost:6070. See the [uuery syntax docs](doc/query_syntax.md)
for more details on the query language.
If you start the web server with `-rpc`, it exposes a [simple JSON search API](doc/json-api.md) at `http://localhost:6070/search/api/search.
Finally, the web server exposes a gRPC API that supports [structured query objects](query/query.go) and advanced search options.
## Acknowledgements
Thanks to Han-Wen Nienhuys for creating Zoekt. Thanks to Alexander Neubeck for
coming up with this idea, and helping Han-Wen Nienhuys flesh it out.