Searcher

CLI tool for searching code across multiple git repositories.

What it does

Clones repositories from a GitHub organisation (filtered by name prefix), then performs regex searches across all of them with coloured terminal output. Useful for finding patterns, usages, or code across a large set of related repositories without manually cloning and grepping each one.

Tech Stack

• Rust — core language
• grep (ripgrep's library) — fast regex-based file searching
• git2/libgit2 (via git_cloner) — repository cloning and branch checkout
• octocrab — GitHub API client for listing organisation repos
• clap — CLI argument parsing
• tokio — async runtime for concurrent operations

Running locally

Requires the GitHub CLI (gh) to be installed and authenticated.

# Search for a pattern across repos in an org
cargo run -- search -o my-org -p repo-prefix -s "pattern" -b main,develop

# Case-sensitive search
cargo run -- search -o my-org -s "ExactMatch" -i false

# Clean up cloned repos
cargo run -- clear

Design Decisions

• ripgrep's grep library over shelling out: Uses the same engine as ripgrep directly as a library, getting fast search with proper binary file detection and coloured output without process spawning.
• Clone-then-search over GitHub search API: GitHub's code search has rate limits and indexing delays. Local cloning gives complete, immediate results across all branches.
• Shared git_cloner crate: Repository cloning logic is extracted into a reusable crate rather than inlined, keeping the search logic focused on search.