GitHub Community
Add branch as a search filter #8564
Replies: 15 comments 35 replies
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We've actually been discussing what the right UX should be, both for surfacing results from non-default branches and for restricting to particular branches. Certainly it seems that, for global or multi-repo searches, most users just expect to see the default branch. What use case do you have in mind? Something like a |
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Fwiw, I'm likely to do: I essentially am collecting a list of patterns / exclusions -- that I feed to my tooling each time it ingests a new repository. Often, I've already written a pattern for a given thing, but I don't remember which of a thousand (1300?) repos has the pattern -- and while some orgs/repositories have publicly added my tooling, most haven't, which means the Yes, on average, I'm never going to use it with a |
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Trying to find results in a "next" branch for a public repo that is actively developing their new version... the only results I get seem to be from their default HEAD. In my case, I would likely be combining use with a
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The use case that I foresee users using within support organizations is that they will want to search a specific branch or tag (not at the same time and always against a specific repo). Support engineers are often asked about errors that surface in specific versions, where the code might be wildly different in the likely-unreleased code in the default branch. This will enable researching issues related to specific releases and quickly reviewing the relevant code instead of just the code of the product. I have to assume that's really the only reason I'd ever want to target a specific branch or tag for search because for any other reason, I'm likely looking at a PR or checking out the branch locally. |
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Fwiw, the support organizations dealing with public repositories could cheat today by creating per release orgs and forking the repository, making their preferred branch the default, and deleting all the other branches/tags. GitHub would even make it easy to sync them via the button on the main page. This is obviously a hack, but, I'd probably do it if I was in a support org. |
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I agree, are there any plans to implement searching on a specific branch? this is the one piece of functionality missing in GitHub that is keeping me from porting some large projects from GitLab. |
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How does code search handles search when |
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Last time I tried, that's indeed what it appeared to do. To clarify: |
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@instanceofme Good to hear that, and thanks for clarification :) |
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@kblok @carlpett @instanceofme @sbryan @gravyboat Hi all! I thought of this idea: #16334
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great idea! |
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Hi all! I thought of this idea: Control access to the branches of each repository - What do you all think of this idea? ui/ux
NotesWith the branch control, you can search by branch types: public, private. |
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Just here to 👍 indexing all branches. From search specification perspective I think it would be nice to be able to
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Is this part of the new search currently in technology preview? |
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No: https://docs.github.com/en/search-github/github-code-search/about-github-code-search#limitations
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Just saw new search hit public beta and was hoping this'd be one of the improvements, sadly not 😿 |
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I'm going to second this! That'd be super helpful right about now, and slow search times would be preferable to manually digging through files. |
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That's exactly right, it doesn't need to be instant but it needs to be there. |
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Was just going to add a comment saying I'd be fine with lazy indexing, even if it means the given search takes 10 or 15 seconds (or however long). Echoing back to the comment here, I'm not on the support team but I've found myself wanting this when poking around the repos of dependencies. We can't always update to the newest version, so it's helpful to be able to search the version we're actually using. For the ones I look at all the time, I've resorted to forking, cloning, and checking out a given release tag, but that's obviously neither fast nor super scalable. |
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This is going to be super helpful to search in a branch. |
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This is useful to search for something in PRs when reviewing them. It could be reasonable to only make it available in non-stale branch, if indexing volume is a concern. |
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Was looking for how to search on a branch and I am very shocked github isn't capable of it |
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That's true. According to sourcegraph.com "With GitHub, only the default branch is searchable (though GitHub is planning to support branch search in the future)." |
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I literally was trying to roll out protection for our internal specifically named protected branches and wanted to make sure all branches in our org with this naming convention was protected. |
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Searching within a branch would be great. This is especially important with repos where the branches aren't necessarily the same content, such as gh-pages branches. A start would be letting us search the currently selected branch. FWIW, one solution to not having branch search is forking the repo and doing feature-branch work in the fork. This isn't always available though, especially if you care about maintaining the fork relationship on GH. It's easy to clone and push to a new repo, but that GH fork relationship is broken. |
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29 Jan 2024: I tried to use this feature (searching with |
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One trick that was mentioned by someone else is that you could fork your repo and set the PR branch as the main branch for the repo, then you would be able to search it. |
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Yup. It's still the best solution today. https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/8564#discussioncomment-2830645 If you only have one PR from a repo, making that branch the default branch for your repo makes a lot of sense too since it lets people see magic files like |
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I can see how it wouldn't necessarily make sense to index all branches, when certain branches have a short time of life. Perhaps there could be an option to explicitly enable indexing on a per branch basis (where it would be automatically enabled on the main branch), which would then allow to filter results by branch... |
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Hmm on the other hand it could be useful for doing code reviews on feature branches! e.g. when there is a task to remove all occurrences of component x, or to check if something was updated in all places etc. It could be useful to search there instead of having to clone it |
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I'd love to at least say the other important branches on a repo. |
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I've occasionally (accidentally) created multiple related versions of a repository in a single owner -- I don't think I've done it intentionally yet, but I suppose I could see about documenting how to do that... |
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You can easily do this. Example: jsoref@jsoref-mbp ~ % gh repo fork check-spelling-sandbox/multiple-instances-repo-0 --org check-spelling-sandbox
✓ Created fork check-spelling-sandbox/multiple-instances-repo-1
? Would you like to clone the fork? Yes
Cloning into 'multiple-instances-repo-1'...
remote: Enumerating objects: 3, done.
remote: Counting objects: 100% (3/3), done.
remote: Total 3 (delta 0), reused 0 (delta 0), pack-reused 0
Receiving objects: 100% (3/3), done.
From github.com:check-spelling-sandbox/multiple-instances-repo-0
* [new branch] main -> upstream/main
✓ Cloned fork
! Repository check-spelling-sandbox/multiple-instances-repo-0 set as the default repository. To learn more about the default repository, run: gh repo set-default --help
A new release of gh is available: 2.44.1 → 2.45.0
To upgrade, run: brew upgrade gh
https://github.com/cli/cli/releases/tag/v2.45.0
jsoref@jsoref-mbp ~ % gh repo fork check-spelling-sandbox/multiple-instances-repo-0 --org check-spelling-sandbox
✓ Created fork check-spelling-sandbox/multiple-instances-repo-2
? Would you like to clone the fork? Yes
Cloning into 'multiple-instances-repo-2'...
remote: Enumerating objects: 3, done.
remote: Counting objects: 100% (3/3), done.
remote: Total 3 (delta 0), reused 0 (delta 0), pack-reused 0
Receiving objects: 100% (3/3), done.
From github.com:check-spelling-sandbox/multiple-instances-repo-0
* [new branch] main -> upstream/main
✓ Cloned fork
! Repository check-spelling-sandbox/multiple-instances-repo-0 set as the default repository. To learn more about the default repository, run: gh repo set-default --help
jsoref@jsoref-mbp ~ % gh repo fork check-spelling-sandbox/multiple-instances-repo-0 --org check-spelling-sandbox
✓ Created fork check-spelling-sandbox/multiple-instances-repo-3
? Would you like to clone the fork? Yes
Cloning into 'multiple-instances-repo-3'...
remote: Enumerating objects: 3, done.
remote: Counting objects: 100% (3/3), done.
remote: Total 3 (delta 0), reused 0 (delta 0), pack-reused 0
Receiving objects: 100% (3/3), done.
From github.com:check-spelling-sandbox/multiple-instances-repo-0
* [new branch] main -> upstream/main
✓ Cloned fork
! Repository check-spelling-sandbox/multiple-instances-repo-0 set as the default repository. To learn more about the default repository, run: gh repo set-default --help |
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The reason for the additional org is that the gui historically didn't let you create a fork in the same owner (the gui still today doesn't seem to encourage it, although I think it might be possible by doing a move). |
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It's definitely possible today to fork within an org using the web-ui, though I'm not sure when that feature was added. I was able to fork a repo within my own org, as long as I changed the name. This seems much more reasonable than replicating org team structures and access and policies and IDP configurations and and and |
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Right. Although note that my suggestion is that the repositories not allow anything -- if at all possible, disable issues / actions / pull requests -- the only thing to use the repository for is for a bot to sync the single branch -- you could even have a bot that:
I believe that'd give you search indexing w/o people, on average, being able to open issues/pull requests. (My suggestion about the extra orgs predated the ability to cleanly create multiple forks w/in the same owner... -- I'm glad to hear. & see they changed the ui to allow it as well.) |
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I was looking to search within a specific tagged release of our codebase. I started from a code view set to that tag, and was confused at first when search results were from the master branch, then was amazed to discover there is no feature at all to search the code at a specific tagged release. Please fix this. |
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Please implement this. You guys are Microsoft now... you basically have unlimited money to pay devs for this feature 😅 |
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and others
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It's super hard to search for something on a specific branch or tag. It would be great if we could have a filter for that.
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