index.md

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Code navigation

Quickly navigate your code with high precision.

Code navigation helps you quickly explore code, dependencies, and symbols within the Sourcegraph file view. Code navigation consists of a number of features that make it easier to move through your codebase without getting lost:

• Jump to definition
• Find references
• Find implementations
• Browse symbols defined in current document or folder
• Navigate dependencies
• See docstrings in hover tooltips

★ Try it on public code! Enable it for your code Examples 🗂 Indexers

Code navigation has two different implementations which complement one another:

• Search-based code navigation works out of the box with all of the most popular programming languages, powered by Sourcegraph's code search. Our default search-based code navigation uses syntactic-level heuristics (no language-level semantic information) for fast, performant searches across large code bases.
• Precise code navigation uses compile-time information to provide users with an extremely precise and accurate cross-repository¹ experience. This means you'll get an accurate view of all symbols and where they are used across your code base.

Sourcegraph automatically uses precise code navigation whenever available, and search-based code navigation is used as a fallback when precise navigation is not available.

Precise code navigation requires language-specific indexes to be generated and uploaded to your Sourcegraph instance. We currently have precise code navigation support for the languages below. See the indexers page for a detailed breakdown of each indexer's status.

Language	Indexer	Status
Go	lsif-go	🟢 Generally available
TypeScript, JavaScript	scip-typescript	🟢 Generally available
C, C++	scip-clang	🟡 Partially available
Java, Kotlin, Scala	scip-java	🟢 Generally available
Rust	rust-analyzer	🟢 Generally available
Python	scip-python	🟢 Generally available
Ruby	scip-ruby	🟢 Generally available
C#, Visual Basic	scip-dotnet	🟡 Partially available

The easiest way to configure precise code navigation is with auto-indexing. This feature uses Sourcegraph executors to automatically create indexes for the code, keeping precise code navigation available and up-to-date.

Setting up code navigation for your codebase

Sourcegraph provides search-based code navigation out-of-the-box. There are several options for setting up precise code navigation:

1. Manual indexing. Index a repository and upload it to your Sourcegraph instance:

   • Index a Go repository
   • Index a TypeScript or JavaScript repository
   • Index a Java, Scala, or Kotlin repository
   • Index a Python repository
   • Index a Ruby repository

2. Automate indexing via CI: Add indexing and uploading to your CI setup.

3. Auto-indexing: Sourcegraph will automatically index your repositories and enable precise code navigation for them.

4. Set up auto-dependency indexing to navigate and search through the dependencies your code uses:

   • Go: Enable auto-indexing and Sourcegraph will start indexing your dependencies.
   • JavaScript, TypeScript: Enable auto-indexing and set up an npm dependencies code host.
   • Java, Scala, Kotlin: Enable auto-indexing and set up a JVM dependencies code host.

Explanations

• Introduction to code navigation
• Precise code navigation
  • Code graph data uploads
• Search-based code navigation
• Code navigation features
• Beta Rockskip: Faster search-based code navigation
• Writing an indexer
• Auto-indexing
• Auto-indexing inference

How-to guides

• General

  • Configure data retention policies

• Language-specific guides

  • Index a Go repository
  • Index a TypeScript or JavaScript repository
  • Index a Java, Scala, or Kotlin repository

• Automate uploading code graph data

  • Add code graph data to many repositories
  • Adding code graph data to CI workflows
  • Enable auto-indexing
  • Configure auto-indexing

• Best practices

  • Guide to defining policies as it relates to resource usage

Reference

• Requirements
• Troubleshooting
• FAQ
• Sourcegraph-recommended indexers
• Environment variables
• Auto-indexing configuration

Footnotes

1. Supported for any language with a SCIP indexer. ↩