A few useful GitHub searches

For good and for ill, GitHub dominates the open source world. A huge amount of open source code is available there, even if it’s only a mirror or a fork of a project that’s primarily maintained elsewhere – and that makes it available to GitHub search.

I use GitHub search multiple times a day, and I find it an invaluable tool. I have a couple of shortcuts set up in Alfred so I can search even faster:

I set up these shortcuts with Alfred’s web search features; any good launcher should be able to set up similar shortcuts if you’d find that convenient. Setting up the shortcut isn’t really the point of this post; how I search GitHub is.

These are a couple of searches I find especially useful:

• Search GitHub for code: https://github.com/search?type=Code&q={query} (shortcut “gh”)

  I often find examples more useful than library documentation. Seeing how somebody else is using a particular method or class can help me understand how to use it myself, and GitHub usually has plenty of examples.

  Even if there are no matches, that can be a clue – if I’m using a popular library and there’s nobody using it the same way as me, maybe I’m doing something wrong. It’s a prompt to double-check what I’m doing, and check I’m really taking the best approach.

• Search GitHub repositories: https://github.com/search?q={query} (shortcut “ghr”)

  I have shortcuts set up for the repositories I use at most often, but sometimes I want to look at a different repo – say, the code for a library I’m using. This search is the first step to finding that repo, and then doing a search within that repo for useful information.

• Search code in a GitHub organisation: https://github.com/search?type=Code&q=org:wellcomecollection+{query} (shortcut “ghw”)

  GitHub search has a bunch of advanced options; restricting my search to a single organisation (where I work) is a particularly convenient one. I can find uses of a shared class or function across our different repos without finding similarly-named-but-unrelated code from the rest of the world.

  I often use this if I’m doing some sort of refactor. If I’m changing from one approach to the other, I can find every use of the old approach and upgrade it in one go, rather than having a prolonged period where we run both approaches in parallel.

GitHub code search is far from perfect, but it’s good enough to be useful and it’s helped me out a bunch of times. It’s hard to imagine going back to a time where I don’t have a large corpus of similar code to search when I get stuck on something tricky.