Advanced Global Search

Leverage Elasticsearch for faster, more advanced code search across your entire GitLab instance.

Overview

The Advanced Global Search in GitLab is a powerful search service that saves you time. Instead of creating duplicate code and wasting time, you can now search for code within other teams that can help your own project.

GitLab leverages the search capabilities of Elasticsearch and enables it when searching in:

  • GitLab application
  • Projects
  • Repositories
  • Commits
  • Issues
  • Merge requests
  • Milestones
  • Notes (comments)
  • Snippets
  • Wiki

Use cases

The Advanced Global Search can be useful in various scenarios.

Faster searches

If you are dealing with huge amount of data and want to keep GitLab's search fast, the Advanced Global Search will help you achieve that.

Promote innersourcing

Your company may consist of many different developer teams each of which has their own group where the various projects are hosted. Some of your applications may be connected to each other, so your developers need to instantly search throughout the GitLab instance and find the code they search for.

Searching globally

Just use the search as before and GitLab will show you matching code from each project you have access to.

Advanced Global Search

You can also use the Advanced Syntax Search which provides some useful queries.

Note: Elasticsearch has only data for the default branch. That means that if you go to the repository tree and switch the branch from the default to something else, then the "Code" tab in the search result page will be served by the regular search even if Elasticsearch is enabled.