Please, please support excluding archived repos!

[serhalp]

Hi! I'm so excited that GitHub is rebuilding and significantly improving code search! It's desperately needed.

Please, please don't rebuild a brand new code search that also does not support filtering out results from archived repos.

This missing functionality alone has easily made GitHub code search 50+% less usable than it would otherwise be for me at our org, which contains 900+ repos out of which 600+ are archived. I have to wade through so much noise while holding the context in my head about which repos are archived and therefore irrelevant. I have to let others know when they've been misled into thinking some function is used 25 times when it's actually used 3 times.

There are have been hundreds of people advocating for this for years over here: https://github.community/t/feature-request-search-code-for-not-archived-repositories/2135/56.

If I had children, I would give up my first-born son for this. 🙏🏼

[Avivhdr]

I don't have children but I would give someone else's child for it 👍🏼

[ericLemanissier]

I have two children, but I would give 10 other children for this feature (at least)

[jbarber]

I agree this functionality would be killer. I use Sourcegraph for this exact feature.

[reevesbr]

We have thousands of repos across our organization, being able to code search search active, non-archived repos (the recently announced log4j vulnerability is the trigger for me landing here) is a must have.

[look]

Thanks for the feedback! This is on our roadmap. (The team requests please no children, though.)

[serhalp]

@look That's great news! For an added push... it was on our roadmap to jump ship to Sourcegraph for search in the coming year. With the GitHub code search rebuild announcement, we're close to abandoning that project – but without this feature (excluding archived repos from code search), we'll have to proceed anyway; with it, we'll definitely not bother with an external tool (sorry, any Sourcegraph folks reading this, you seem great).

[devinschumacher]

still not done huh?

[wagnerbsouza]

That latest log4j vulnerability just brought me here. The archived repos in the search results are "annoying".

[look]

This is now implemented!

By default, results from archived repositories are searched, but down-ranked. If a result appears only in an archived repository, you'll see it.

You can change this using is:archived and NOT is:archived. For example, if you want to find Log4J in non-archived repositories only, use:

log4j NOT is:archived

More details are available on the syntax page.

[devops-cmp]

Does it also work when using the api?

[thoraage]

is:archived works perfectly fine, but NOT is:archived does not work; I see both archived and non-archived. Frankly not seeing the archived repositories should be the default.

[mikhailvartanyan]

is:archived works perfectly fine, but NOT is:archived does not work; I see both archived and non-archived. Frankly not seeing the archived repositories should be the default.

+1

[mbargull]

@thoraage, @mikhailvartanyan, -is:archived (i.e., negate by prefixing hyphen-minus) works for me.

[mikelindsey-okta]

This is not working with -is:archived nor with NOT is:archived .. I have a search with 340 results without the exclusion. When I add the exclusion I have 356 hits

[LivingInSyn]

I found NOT is:archived in the documentation for the current codesearch beta, but it doesn't work at all for me. Sample query I'm using is:

NOT is:archived foo

returns archived repos

[LivingInSyn]

this is on cs.github.com

fwiw: I get different results logged in as an admin on the org vs not ( besides just seeing private repos)

[colinwm]

Did you recently archive this repo? It may take some time (~hours) for the archive status to reach the search index.

[LivingInSyn]

at least a week ago, likely much longer ago than that. This is just one example, there are many

[nkojuharov-aca]

I see the same - NOT is:archived is completely ignored - results for archived repos are shown near the top, completely obscuring results for non-archived repos.

[look]

@nkojuharov-aca sorry, we are clearly missing some updates when repos change archived state. We've prioritized a new approach to updating the index when repositories change to address the problems.

[chrisrusso]

@github-staff please help!! I have removed my github organization "codefen", and I need it back. I can't create a new one, the system says the name cannot be taken (probably because still saved somewhere can be recovered). Please help me!!!

[look]

@chrisrusso this is a feedback forum for Code Search and Code Navigation. Please contact customer support: https://support.github.com/contact?tags=rr-restore

[chrisrusso]

@chrisrusso this is a feedback forum for Code Search and Code Navigation. Please contact customer support: https://support.github.com/contact?tags=rr-restore

Thanks bro! I just contacted them! appreciated!!

[drullo]

This is only partially working for me. When searching my organization's repos, adding 'NOT is:archived' to the search does cut down the number of results, but it unfortunately still includes some archived repos.

[brett-swan-sh]

I've found in our organization that this doesn't work at all. In fact, when you codesearch for something that only exists in an archived repo, and set is: archived, the code from the archived repo doesn't show up. But when you search using NOT is:archived, the code in the archived repo does show up...

[look]

Sorry about that. This sounds like a data synchronization issue, which should be resolved the next time we rebuild the index. If you would like us to check on that, let me know the org name.

[brett-swan-sh]

Ah interesting, so there's a delay between archiving the repo and the search function reflecting archive status? Any idea what kind of delay we can expect for that?

[look]

There is a delay between a change happening and the search engine being updated, but it is also possible for a change to be processed out of order, which results in the archived status reflecting the old value. We correct this the next time a change happens, but for archived repositories, that's not usually until the next index rebuild.

[brett-swan-sh]

fair enough. Any idea what that delay looks like? 5, 15, 30 mins, 1 hour, 1 day?

[look]

The normal indexing delay is about 5 minutes. If we miss an update (like I suspect happened here), the fix won't roll out until the next rebuild. We do that about once a week or so.

[devinschumacher]

[Workaround]

Here's my workaround for all you frustrated cats (i was too till i just figured this out)

Create a new organization called yourorganization-archive

and instead of "archiving" a repo (i guess you still can do that too) you just "transfer" the repo.

boom! solved & saved :)

🍻 cheers!

now lets connect on social bc i need more developers and smart people feeds to read instead of political nonsense and camgirl spam

twitter @dvnschmhr
YT: @devinschumacher

[rzuckerm]

When is this feature going to be rolled out to GitHub Enterprise? It looks like it's been in public GitHub for well over a year. I tried this on our 3.11.2 instance, and it does not work. For example:

filename:foo

returns N matches.

filename:foo is:archived

returns the same N matches, even though I know there are archived repos.

filename:foo NOT is:archived

returns no matches.