You can search for repositories globally across all of GitHub, or search for repositories within a particular organization. For more information, see About searching on GitHub.
To include forks in the search results, you will need to add fork:true or fork:only to your query. For more information, see Searching in forks.
Tip
- This article contains links to example searches on the GitHub.com website, but you can use the same search filters in any GitHub platform. In the linked example searches, replace
github.comwith the hostname for your GitHub platform. - For a list of search syntaxes that you can add to any search qualifier to further improve your results, see Understanding the search syntax.
- Use quotations around multi-word search terms. For example, if you want to search for issues with the label "In progress," you'd search for
label:"in progress". Search is not case sensitive.
Search by repository name, description, or contents of the README file
With the in qualifier you can restrict your search to the repository name, repository description, repository topics, contents of the README file, or any combination of these. When you omit this qualifier, only the repository name, description, and topics are searched.
| Qualifier | Example |
|---|---|
in:name | jquery in:name matches repositories with "jquery" in the repository name. |
in:description | jquery in:name,description matches repositories with "jquery" in the repository name or description. |
in:topics | jquery in:topics matches repositories labeled with "jquery" as a topic. |
in:readme | jquery in:readme matches repositories mentioning "jquery" in the repository's README file. |
repo:owner/name | repo:octocat/hello-world matches a specific repository name. |
Search based on the contents of a repository
You can find a repository by searching for content in the repository's README file using the in:readme qualifier. For more information, see About the repository README file.
Besides using in:readme, it's not possible to find repositories by searching for specific content within the repository. To search for a specific file or content within a repository, you can use the file finder or code-specific search qualifiers. For more information, see Finding files on GitHub and Understanding GitHub Code Search syntax.
| Qualifier | Example |
|---|---|
in:readme | octocat in:readme matches repositories mentioning "octocat" in the repository's README file. |
Search within a user's or organization's repositories
To search in all repositories owned by a certain user or organization, you can use the user or org qualifier.
| Qualifier | Example |
|---|---|
user:USERNAME | user:defunkt forks:>100 matches repositories from @defunkt that have more than 100 forks. |
org:ORGNAME | org:github matches repositories from GitHub. |
Search by repository size
The size qualifier finds repositories that match a certain size (in kilobytes), using greater than, less than, and range qualifiers. For more information, see Understanding the search syntax.
| Qualifier | Example |
|---|---|
size:n | size:1000 matches repositories that are 1 MB exactly. |
size:>n | size:>=30000 matches repositories that are at least 30 MB. |
size:<n | size:<50 matches repositories that are smaller than 50 KB. |
size:n..n | size:50..120 matches repositories that are between 50 KB and 120 KB. |