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A search context is a user-defined grouping of repositories that helps focus searches on specific areas of your codebase, like frontend, backend, or infrastructure code. Some example queries using search contexts:

  • context:data_engineering userId - search for userId across all repos related to Data Engineering.
  • context:k8s ingress - search for anything related to ingresses in your k8’s configs.
  • ( context:project1 or context:project2 ) logger\.debug - search for debug log calls in project1 and project2

Search contexts are defined in the context object inside of a declarative config. Repositories can be included / excluded from a search context by specifying the repo’s URL in either the include array or exclude array. Glob patterns are supported.

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Example

Let’s assume we have a GitLab instance hosted at https://gitlab.example.com with three top-level groups, web, backend, and shared:

web/
├─ admin_panel/
├─ customer_portal/
├─ pipelines/
├─ ...
backend/
├─ billing_server/
├─ auth_server/
├─ db_migrations/
├─ pipelines/
├─ ...
shared/
├─ protobufs/
├─ react/
├─ pipelines/
├─ ...

To make searching easier, we can create three search contexts in our config.json:

  • web: For all frontend-related code
  • backend: For backend services and shared APIs
  • pipelines: For all CI/CD configurations
{
    "$schema": "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/sourcebot-dev/sourcebot/main/schemas/v3/index.json",
    "contexts": {
        "web": {
            // To include repositories in a search context,
            // you can reference them...
            "include": [
                // ... individually by specifying the repo URL.
                "gitlab.example.com/web/admin_panel/core",


                // ... or as groups using glob patterns. This is
                // particularly useful for including entire "sub-folders"
                // of repositories in one go.
                "gitlab.example.com/web/customer_portal/**",
                "gitlab.example.com/shared/react/**",
                "gitlab.example.com/shared/protobufs/**"
            ],

            // Same with excluding repositories.
            "exclude": [
                "gitlab.example.com/web/customer_portal/pipelines",
                "gitlab.example.com/shared/react/hooks/**",
            ],

            // Optional description of the search context
            // that surfaces in the UI.
            "description": "Web related repos."
        },
        "backend": { /* ... specifies backend replated repos ... */},
        "pipelines": { /* ... specifies pipeline related repos ... */ }
    },
    "connections": {
        /* ...connection definitions... */
    }
}

Once configured, you can use these contexts in the search bar by prefixing your query with the context name. For example:

  • context:web login form searches for login form code in frontend repositories
  • context:backend auth searches for authentication code in backend services
  • context:pipelines deploy searches for deployment configurations

Example

Like other prefixes, contexts can be negated using - or combined using or:

  • -context:web excludes frontend repositories from results
  • ( context:web or context:backend ) searches across both frontend and backend code

See this doc for more details on the search query syntax.

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Schema reference