How to find good open source code libraries: Sourcegraph code browser

The beauty of open source programming is that there are a lot of code libraries available to software application developers, obviously.

Some would call it a ‘goldmine’ of open source code.

Some would call it a ‘confusing mix’ of poorly categorised and classified resources

Sourcegraph answer

Sourcegraph aims to answer the challenge here with a search engine and code browser designed to help developers find the code they need.

The product ‘semantically indexes’ all the open source code available on the web.

Sourcegraph is a code search engine that lets the user search across hundreds of thousands of libraries and browse code in the same way you can do in a good IDE.

Software application developers can can search for code by:

• repository,
• package,
• function

They can then click on fully linked code to read docs, definitions and find usage examples.

All these actions can be performed in the web browser, without having to configure any editor plugin.

According to opensource.com, “If you’re an author of an open source project or library, you should enable your repository on Sourcegraph. Enabling your repositories tells Sourcegraph to analyze and index your code so that contributors and users of your libraries can search and browse the code on Sourcegraph. These features can help your users save hours by letting them quickly find and understand pieces of code. A single good usage example can be worth a thousand words of documentation. Enabling repositories is free and always will be for open source.”

Sign in

Sign in with a GitHub account. Signing in is optional, but it helps find all a developer’s attributable open-source code.

(Out of respect for people’s privacy, the team only shows an obfuscated email address when attributing code to people who have not yet signed in to Sourcegraph.)

Sourcegraph does not request any of your private data.