GitLab Search

This is a command line tool that allows you to search for contents across all your GitLab repositories. That's something GitLab doesn't provide out of the box for non-enterprise users, but is extremely valuable when needed.

Prerequisites

1. Install Node.js
2. Create a personal GitLab access token with the read_api scope.

Installation

$ npm install -g gitlab-search

To finish the installation you need to configure the personal access token you've created previously:

$ gitlab-search setup <your personal access token>

That will create a .gitlabsearchrc file in the current directory. That configuration file can be placed in different places on your machine, valid locations are described in the rc package's README. You can decide where that file is saved when invoking the setup command, see more details in its help:

$ gitlab-search setup --help

Usage

Searching through all the repositories you've got access to:

$ gitlab-search [options] [command] <search-term>

Options:
  -V, --version                            output the version number
  -g, --groups <group-names>               group(s) to find repositories in (separated with comma)
  -r, --recursive                          Search recursively in projects in the given groups
  -f, --filename <filename>                only search for contents in given a file, glob matching with wildcards (*)
  -e, --extension <file-extension>         only search for contents in files with given extension
  -p, --path <path>                        only search in files in the given path
  -a, --archive [all,only,exclude]         to only search on archived repositories, or to exclude them, by default the search will be apply to all repositories (default: "all")
  -h, --help                               display help for command

Commands:
  setup [options] <personal-access-token>  create configuration file

Use with Self-Managed GitLab

To search a self-hosted installation of GitLab, setup has options for, among other things, setting a custom domain:

$ gitlab-search setup --help

Usage: setup [options] <personal-access-token>

create configuration file

Options:
  --ignore-ssl            ignore invalid SSL certificate from the GitLab API server
  --api-domain <name>     domain name or root URL of GitLab API server,
                          specify root URL (without trailing slash) to use HTTP instead of HTTPS (default: "gitlab.com")
  --dir <path>            path to directory to save configuration file in (default: ".")
  --concurrency <number>  limit the amount of concurrent HTTPS requests sent to GitLab when searching,
                          useful when *many* projects are hosted on a small GitLab instance
                          to avoid overwhelming the instance resulting in 502 errors (default: 25)
  -h, --help              display help for command

Debugging

If something seems fishy or you're just curious what gitlab-search does under the hood, enabling debug logging helps:

$ DEBUG=1 gitlab-search here-is-my-search-term
Requesting: GET https://gitlab.com/api/v4/groups?per_page=100
Using groups: name-of-group1, name-of-group2
Requesting: GET https://gitlab.com/api/v4/groups/42/projects?per_page=100
Requesting: GET https://gitlab.com/api/v4/groups/1337/projects?per_page=100
Using projects: hello-world, my-awesome-website.com
Requesting: GET https://gitlab.com/api/v4/projects/666/search?scope=blobs&search=here-is-my-search-term
Requesting: GET https://gitlab.com/api/v4/projects/999/search?scope=blobs&search=here-is-my-search-term

Installing from source

1. Install node 14.x
2. Clone this repository
3. Build with

   $ npm run build

4. Run from bin directory

   $ bin/gitlab-search.js -h

License

MIT