Sourcegull

Find code across thousands of repositories in milliseconds, with up to 50× fewer tokens. For you and your agents.

Self-hosted code search and code intelligence for GitLab, GitHub and Gitea, written in Rust. Every feature is open source under Apache-2.0, including SSO, SCIM, RBAC and audit logs. There is no paid tier, and there will not be one.

Quick install · Production install · Documentation · Query language · AI agents (MCP) · Architecture · Development

Fast search, fewer tokens

Agents connected over MCP read only the lines that answer their question, with up to 50× fewer tokens than cloning and grepping (token usage).

Sourcegull uses a trigram index of its own. After a push, only the changed paths are written to a delta shard, so new commits are searchable within seconds without rebuilding the repository's index. Small repositories are packed together into compound shards, which keeps instances with thousands of repositories fast. Revisions that are not indexed (any branch, tag or commit) are searched straight from git. Results stream as they are found.

How it compares with the alternatives on the same GitLab: Benchmark.

Everything is free

Every feature is in this repository under Apache-2.0. There is no enterprise edition, no licence key and no paid tier, and the project will not add one. That includes the features that other code search products usually sell separately:

• Single sign-on with GitLab, GitHub or Gitea OAuth, OpenID Connect or an authenticating proxy (HTTP header), and SCIM provisioning.
• Roles (RBAC), repository permissions synced from GitLab and enforced on every read, and an audit log.
• Precise code navigation from SCIP indexes, across repositories and package versions, uploaded from GitLab CI or built by auto-indexing, with search-based results filling in for repositories that are not indexed.
• Bulk changes: one YAML spec changes many repositories, then opens and tracks the GitLab merge requests.
• Trends, watches and exhaustive search jobs with CSV/JSONL export.
• Repository storage across several repo nodes, added or removed without downtime.
• Usage analytics that stay on the instance.
• An MCP server for AI coding agents.

Also included: literal, regexp, keyword (BM25) and structural search; notebooks; code ownership; saved searches and search contexts; a GraphQL API, the gull CLI and outbound webhooks; Grafana dashboards and documented alerts. See the documentation.

Ready for production

• One Rust binary, and PostgreSQL (16 or newer) is its only stateful dependency. Nothing is sent to a vendor cloud.
• No telemetry. Usage analytics stay on the instance.
• Docker Compose for one host, a Helm chart for Kubernetes. Every release is tested by upgrading from the previous one.
• Repository storage spreads across several repo nodes, which you can add or remove without downtime.
• Stored secrets are encrypted, and the keys rotate without a restart.
• Grafana dashboards and Prometheus alerts are included.
• Configuration as code: sign-in, code host connections and site admins come from files in git, and secrets come from the environment.
• GitLab (gitlab.com and self-managed) has every feature. GitHub (github.com and Enterprise Server) and Gitea support repository sync, permission sync, webhooks and sign-in.
• Several code hosts at once: connect gitlab.com, a self-managed GitLab, GitHub and Gitea side by side, and one search covers all of them, each with its own permissions.

Quick install

To try Sourcegull or run it for a small team on one host, download the Compose bundle of the latest release and start PostgreSQL and Sourcegull with the published image, ghcr.io/sourcegull/sourcegull (linux/amd64):

curl -fsSL https://github.com/sourcegull/sourcegull/releases/latest/download/sourcegull-compose.tar.gz | tar -xz

cd sourcegull-compose echo "POSTGRES_PASSWORD=$(openssl rand -hex 24)" > .env docker compose up -d

Open http://localhost:7080. The first user to sign up becomes the site admin. Add a GitLab, GitHub or Gitea connection under Site admin → Code host connections, and repositories start cloning and indexing.

Production deployments

docs/install.md is the install guide. For production, use one of these:

• Kubernetes (Helm), for larger installs and several repo nodes: install.md → Kubernetes, with an external PostgreSQL and your own secret, size presets and sizing. Every value is in the chart README.
• Docker Compose, production layout (compose.production.yaml, one container per role), for one host: install.md → Production layout.

Running either one is covered by the docs on upgrades (Compose, Helm), backups, monitoring and configuration as code.

AI agents (MCP)

/.api/mcp is a Model Context Protocol server. Coding agents search code, read files, find symbols, definitions and references, and read history (log, commits, compare, blame) with the caller's permissions, in output sized for a model's context. Connect an agent in the sidebar gives copy-paste setup for Claude Code, Cursor, VS Code, Codex, Gemini CLI, Zed, JetBrains and others, with a one-click token. For Claude Code:

claude mcp add --transport http sourcegull https://sourcegull.example.com/.api/mcp \

--header "Authorization: Bearer "

Tools and examples: docs/mcp.md.

How it works

One binary, sourcegull, runs in roles: web (UI, APIs, search fan-out), repo (git storage, index shards and search, partitioned across nodes), worker (background jobs) and blob (blob store); sourcegull supervise runs them all in one process. sourcegull executor runs sandboxed jobs in Docker or Kubernetes. PostgreSQL holds the data, job queues, leases and caches; there is no Redis. Each repo node indexes and searches its own repositories; web parses the query, applies permissions, fans it out to the nodes and merges the result streams. Details in docs/architecture.md.

Build from source

Everything runs in Docker; nothing to install but Docker with Compose.

docker compose up -d          # Postgres, Sourcegull built from this checkout, UI dev server

open http://localhost:5173 # UI with hot reload; API on :7080 scripts/dev test # the test suite against the dev Postgres scripts/dev check # rustfmt, clippy -D warnings, UI type check and tests scripts/dev help # e2e tests, benchmarks, a local GitLab with seed data, ...

More in docs/development.md.

Alternatives

🟢 free · 💰 paid · 🟡 incomplete · 🔴 not available

• Sourcegraph is the most complete code intelligence platform, self-hosted under a commercial licence.
• Sourcebot builds a web UI, an MCP server and an AI assistant on Zoekt. It is closed source since version 6. The free plan stops at 5 users, permission syncing and analytics are in paid plans, and SCIM and audit logs are in the Enterprise plan.
• Zoekt is a fast trigram search engine and nothing else. It answers literal queries faster than Sourcegull; Sourcegull indexes faster, needs less disk and answers regexps faster (below).

Benchmark: the same GitLab, one product at a time

Each product indexed the same 1,007 public projects from one GitLab CE 19.4 instance: 7 large repositories at pinned releases (Linux, LLVM, Go, Rust, Kubernetes, GitLab, TensorFlow; 4.4 GB of source) and 1,000 generated repositories with history (0.84 GB). Every product ran alone, from a fresh install, next to GitLab on one host with 6 CPUs and 24 GB of memory.

| Sourcegull | 3 min 21 s | 3.7 GB | 2.2 GB | 3.7 GB | 54 / 69 ms (724) | 48 / 54 ms (10