Sourcegraph for Visual Studio Code

Sourcegraph’s code search allows you to find & fix things fast across all your code.

Sourcegraph for VS Code allows you to search millions of open source repositories right from your VS Code IDE—for free. You can learn from helpful code examples, search best practices, and re-use code from millions of repositories across the open source universe.

Plus, with a free Sourcegraph Cloud account, you can sync your own private and public repositories and search all of your code in a single view in VS Code. Sourcegraph’s Code Intelligence feature provides fast, cross-repository navigation with “Go to definition” and “Find references” features, allowing you to understand new code quickly and find answers in your code across codebases of any size.

You can read more about Sourcegraph on our website.

Installation

From the Visual Studio Marketplace:

1. Install Sourcegraph from the Visual Studio Marketplace.
2. Launch VS Code, and click on the Sourcegraph (Wildcard) icon in the VS Code Activity Bar to open the Sourcegraph extension. Alternatively, you can launch the extension by pressing Cmd+Shift+P or Ctrl+Shift+P and searching for “Sourcegraph: Open search tab.”

From within VS Code:

1. Open the extensions tab on the left side of VS Code (Cmd+Shift+X or Ctrl+Shift+X).
2. Search for Sourcegraph -> Install and Reload.

From Gitpod VS Code Workspaces:

1. Open the Extensions view by clicking on the Extensions icon in the Activity Bar on the side of your Gitpod VS Code workspace
2. Search for Sourcegraph -> Install and Reload.

Using the Sourcegraph extension

To get started and open the Sourcegraph extension, simply click the Sourcegraph (Wildcard) icon in the VS Code Activity Bar.

Sourcegraph functions like any search engine; simply type in your search query, and Sourcegraph will populate search results.

Sourcegraph offers 3 different ways to search:

1. Literal search
2. Structural search
3. Regular expressions

Sourcegraph also accepts filters to narrow down search results, such as repo, file, and lang. Check out our search cheat sheet.

For example, you can search for "auth provider" in a Go repository with a search like this one:

repo:sourcegraph/sourcegraph lang:go auth provider

Adding and searching your own code

Creating an account

In addition to searching open source code, you can create a Sourcegraph Cloud account to search your own private and public repositories. You can create an account and sync your repositories with the following steps:

1. Click the Create an account button in the sidebar of the Sourcegraph extension. You will be directed to sourcegraph.com in your browser.
2. Create an account using your email or connect directly to your code host.
3. Once you have created an account, navigate to Sourcegraph Cloud. Click on your profile icon in the navigation bar to go to Your repositories.
4. Click Manage repositories. From here, you can add your repositories to be synced to Sourcegraph.

Connecting Sourcegraph Cloud account

Once you have repositories synced to Sourcegraph, you can generate an access token to connect your VS Code extension back to your Sourcegraph Cloud account.

1. Back in Sourcegraph Cloud, in your account settings, navigate to Access tokens, then click Generate new token.
2. Once you have generated a token, navigate back to the Sourcegraph extension. In the sidebar, under Create an account, click Have an account?.
3. Copy and paste the generated token from step 4 into the input field in the sidebar.
4. Alternatively, you can copy and paste the generated token from step 4 in this format: “sourcegraph.accessToken": "e4234234123112312” into your VS Code Setting by going to Code > Preference > Settings > Search for "Sourcegraph" > Edit in settings.json.
5. The Editor will be re loaded automatically to use the newly added token.

Connecting to a private Sourcegraph instance

1. In Sourcegraph, in your account settings, navigate to Access tokens, then click Generate new token.
2. Once you have generated a token, navigate to your VS Code Settings, then navigate to "Extension settings".
3. Navigate to Code preferences, then click Settings.
4. Search for Sourcegraph, and enter the newly generated access token as well as your Sourcegraph instance URL.
5. Add custom headers using the sourcegraph.requestHeaders setting (added in v2.0.9) if a specific header is required to make connection to your private instance.

Adding it to your workspace's recommended extensions

1. Create a .vscode folder (if not already present) in the root of your repository
2. Inside that folder, create a new file named extensions.json (if it doesn't already exist) with the following structure.

{
	"recommendations": ["sourcegraph.sourcegraph"]
}

3. If the file does exist, append "sourcegraph.sourcegraph" to the "recommendations" array.
4. Push the changes to your repository for your other colleagues to share.

Alternatively you can use the Extensions: Configure Recommended Extensions (Workspace Folder) command from within VS Code.

Keyboard Shortcuts:

Extension Settings

This extension contributes the following settings:

Questions & Feedback

Please take a look at our troubleshooting docs for known issues and common issues in the VS Code extension.

Feedback and feature requests can be submitted to our VS Code Extension Feedback Discussion Board on GitHub.

Uninstallation

1. Open the extensions tab on the left side of VS Code (Cmd+Shift+X or Ctrl+Shift+X).
2. Search for Sourcegraph -> Gear icon -> Uninstall and Reload.

Changelog

Click here to check the full changelog.

VS Code will auto-update extensions to the highest version available. Even if you have opted into a pre-release version, you will be updated to the released version when a higher version is released.

The Sourcegraph extension uses major.EVEN_NUMBER.patch (eg. 2.0.1) for release versions and major.ODD_NUMBER.patch (eg. 2.1.1) for pre-release versions.```

Development

Please see the CONTRIBUTING document if you are interested in contributing directly to our code base.