How to grep in Git
Łukasz Holeczek
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Finding specific code patterns or text across a large repository is essential for debugging, refactoring, and understanding code dependencies. With over 25 years of software development experience and as the creator of CoreUI, I’ve searched through countless large codebases for specific implementations. Git grep is a powerful built-in command that searches for patterns in tracked files, respecting .gitignore and offering better performance than regular grep. This approach searches only version-controlled files and can search across different branches and commits.
Use git grep to search for text patterns efficiently across your Git repository.
# Basic search for a pattern
git grep 'function'
# Case-insensitive search
git grep -i 'TODO'
# Search for whole words only
git grep -w 'user'
# Show line numbers
git grep -n 'export'
# Count matches per file
git grep -c 'import'
# Search in specific file types
git grep 'className' -- '*.jsx' '*.js'
# Search for pattern in specific directory
git grep 'useState' -- src/components/
# Search for multiple patterns (OR)
git grep -e 'useState' -e 'useEffect'
# Search and show function context
git grep -p 'handleClick'
# Search in specific branch
git grep 'apiKey' main
# Search in specific commit
git grep 'PASSWORD' abc1234
# Search with regex
git grep -E 'function\s+\w+\('
Best Practice Note
Git grep is significantly faster than regular grep because it only searches tracked files and uses Git’s internal indexing. The -p flag shows the function or class name containing the match, which is extremely useful for context. Use --and to combine multiple patterns that must all match, or --not to exclude patterns. For searching commit messages instead of file content, use git log --grep. This is how we search CoreUI repositories—using git grep to quickly locate component implementations, find usage patterns, and identify technical debt across thousands of files.
