How can I search for a commit message on GitHub

Question

Not in a Git repository  but rather in GitHub specifically - how do I search just the commit messages of a specific repository branch

User · Answer

As of mid-2019  type your query in the top left search box hit Enter click  quot Commits quot   Screenshot

User · Answer

If you have a local version of the repository  you might want to try this crude shell script I wrote to open the GitHub pages for all commits matching your search term in new tabs in your default browser      bin sh for sha1 in   git rev-list HEAD -i --grep   1    do     python -mwebbrowser https   github com RepoOwnerUserName RepoName commit  sha1  gt  dev null 2 gt  dev null done   Just replace https   github com RepoOwnerUserName RepoName  with the actual GitHub URL of your repository  save the script somewhere  e g  as githubsearch sh  make it executable  chmod  x githubsearch sh  and then add the following alias to your    bashrc file   alias githubsearch   path to githubsearch sh    Then  from anywhere in your Git repository  just do this at the terminal   githubsearch  what you want to search for    and any commits that match your  case insensitive  search term will have their corresponding GitHub pages opened in your browser   Be warned that if your search term appears in hundreds of commits  this may well crash your browser and eat your PC s CPU for a while

User · Answer

Update January 2017  two years later   You can now search for commit messages   still only in the master branch    February 2015  Not sure that could ever be possible  considering the current search infrastructure base on Elasticsearch  introduced in January 2013   As an answer  quot drawing from credible and or official sources quot   here is an interview done with the GitHub people in charge of introducing Elasticsearch at GitHub  August 2013   Tim Pease  We have two document types in there  One is a source code file and the other one is a repository  The way that git works is you have commits and you have a branch for each commit  Repository documents keep track of the most recent commit for that particular repository that has been indexed  When a user pushes a new commit up to Github  we then pull that repository document from elasticsearch  We then see the most recently indexed commit and then we get a list of all the files that had been modified  or added  or deleted between this recent push and what we have previously indexed  Then we can go ahead and just update those documents which have been changed  We don   t have to re-index the entire source code tree every time someone pushes  Andrew Cholakian  So  you guys only index  I   m assuming  the master branch  Tim Pease  Correct  It   s only the head of the master branch that you   re going to get in there and still that   s a lot of data  two billion documents  30 terabytes  Andrew Cholakian  That is awesomely huge           Tim Pease  With indexing source code on push  it   s a self-healing process  We have that repository document which keeps track of the last indexed commit  If we missed  just happen to miss three commits where those jobs fail  the next commit that comes in  we   re still looking at the diff between the previous commit that we indexed and the one that we   re seeing with this new push  You do a git diff and you get all the files that have been updated  deleted  or added  You can just say     Okay  we need to remove these files  We need to add these files  and all that     It   s self-healing and that   s the approach that we have taken with pretty much all of the architecture   That all means not all the branches of all the repo would be indexed with that approach  A global commit message search isn t available for now  And Tim Pease himself confirms commit messages are not indexed  Note that it isn t impossible to get one s own elasticsearch local indexing of a local clone  see  quot Searching a git repository with ElasticSearch quot  But for a specific repo  the easiest remains to clone it and do a  git log --all --grep  my search    More options at  quot How to search a Git repository by commit message  quot

User · Answer

The short answer is  you cannot search commit messages directly on github com the website  For the time being we recommend the local git grep solution others on this thread have proposed   At one point in time GitHub did offer a git grep style search over commit messages for a single repository  Unfortunately  this approach exposed a denial of service that could render a file server inaccessible  For this reason  we removed git grep searching   Current back-of-the envelope estimates puts the number of commits in GitHub somewhere around the 80 billion mark  Although Google engineers laugh behind our backs  this is a rather large number of documents to store in ElasticSearch  We d love to make this dataset searchable  but it is not a trivial project

User · Answer

This was removed from GitHub  I use    git log --all --oneline   grep  search query      You can also filter by author    git log --all --oneline --author rickhanlonii   grep  search query

User · Answer

From the help page on searching code  it seems that this isn t yet possible   You can search for text in your repository  including the ability to choose files or paths to search in  but you can t specify that you want to search in commits   Maybe suggest this to them

User · Answer

Update  2017 01 05    GitHub has published an update that allows you now to search within commit messages from within their UI  See blog post for more information     I had the same question and contacted someone GitHub yesterday   Since they switched their search engine to Elasticsearch it s not possible to search for commit messages using the GitHub UI  But that feature is on the team s wishlist   Unfortunately there s no release date for that function right now

User · Answer

This works well from within Eclipse  until GitHub adds the feature     EGit User Guide  Searching for commits

User · Answer

Using Advanced Search on Github seemed the easiest with a combination of other answers   It s basically a search string builder  https   github com search advanced For example I wanted to find all commits in Autodesk maya-usd containing  quot USD quot   Then in the search results can choose Commits from the list on the left

User · Answer

You used to be able to do this  but GitHub removed this feature at some point mid-2013  To achieve this locally  you can do   git log -g --grep STRING    Use the -g flag if you want to search other branches and dangling commits    -g  --walk-reflogs     Instead of walking the commit ancestry chain  walk reflog entries from     the most recent one to older ones

User · Answer

Since this has been removed from GitHub  I ve been using gitk on Linux to do this   From terminal go to your repository and type gitk   In the middle of the GUI  there s a search box  It provides a good selection of filters     Scope - containing  touching paths  adding removing string  changing line matching  Match type - Exact IgnCase Regexp  Search fields - All fields Headline Comments Committer

User · Answer

You can do this with repositories that have been crawled by Google  results vary from repository to repository    Search all branches of all crawled repositories for  change license       change license  site https   github com     commits   Search master branch of all crawled repositories for  change license        change license  site https   github com     commits master   Search master branch of all crawled twitter repositories for  change license       change license  site https   github com twitter   commits master   Search all branches of twitter some project repository for  change license       change license  site https   github com twitter some project commits

User · Answer

Here s the quick answer It s possible   Simply search like so in the github search box  top left   repo torvalds linux merge false mmap  i e   And here s the results   Read more here

User · Answer

As of 2017 it s a functionality included in GitHub itself   The example search used by them is repo torvalds linux merge false crypto policy        GIF image from https   github com blog 2299-search-commit-messages

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