Show HN: Sourcebot, an open-source Sourcegraph alternative

[bshzzle]

https://github.com/sourcebot-dev/sourcebot

Hi HN,

We’re Brendan and Michael, the creators of Sourcebot (https://github.com/sourcebot-dev/sourcebot). Sourcebot is an open-source code search tool that allows you to quickly search across many large codebases. Check out our demo video here: https://youtu.be/mrIFYSB_1F4, or try it for yourself on our demo site here: https://demo.sourcebot.dev

While at prior roles, we’ve both felt the pain of searching across hundreds of multi-million line codebases. Using local tools like grep were ill-suited since you often only had a handful of codebases checked out at a time. Sourcegraph (https://sourcegraph.com/) solves this issue by indexing a collection of codebases in the background and exposing a web-based search interface. It is the de-facto search solution for medium to large orgs, but is often cited as expensive ($49 per user / month) and recently went closed source (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41296481). That’s why we built Sourcebot.

We designed Sourcebot to be:

- Easily deployed: we provide a single, self-contained Docker image (https://github.com/sourcebot-dev/sourcebot/pkgs/container/so...).

- Fast & scalable: designed to minimize search times (current average is ~73ms) across many large repositories.

- Cross code-host support: we currently support syncing public & private repositories in GitHub and GitLab.

- Quality UI: we like to think that a good looking dev-tool is more pleasant to use.

- Open source: Sourcebot is free to use by anyone.

Under the hood, we use Zoekt (https://github.com/sourcegraph/zoekt) as our code search engine, which was originally authored by Han-Wen Nienhuys and now maintained by Sourcegraph (https://sourcegraph.com/blog/sourcegraph-accepting-zoekt-mai...). Zoekt works by building a trigram index from the source code enabling extremely fast regular expression matching. Russ Cox has a great article on how trigram indexes work if you’re interested: https://swtch.com/~rsc/regexp/regexp4.html

In the shorter-term, there are several improvements we want to make, like:

- Improving how we communicate indexing progress (this is currently non-existent so it’s not obvious how long things will take)

- UX improvements like search history, query syntax highlighting & suggestions, etc.

- Small QOL improvements like bookmarking code snippets.

- Support for more code hosts (e.g., BitBucket, SourceForge, ADO, etc.)

In the longer-term, we want to investigate how we could go beyond just traditional code search by leveraging machine learning to enable experiences like semantic code search (“where is system X located?”) and code explanations (”how does system X interact with system Y?”). You could think of this as a copilot being embedded into Sourcebot. Our hunch is that will be useful to devs, especially when packaged with the traditional code search, but let us know what you think.

Give it a try: https://github.com/sourcebot-dev/sourcebot. Cheers!

[peterldowns]

Re-asking [0] as a top-level question, since it has gone unanswered: do you intend to make a business out of this project in some way, or is it a "real" open source project?

I know that intentions can change, but I'm curious how you see it. Sourcegraph was pretty clearly always going to be a business-type-of-project, and like most business projects, relicensed everything to their custom enterprise license. Originally it was Apache 2 [1].

I love open source and I write a lot of it myself [2]. I use the MIT license, just like you've done here, and I admire that. I don't think you owe me or anyone else anything, and the MIT license makes that clear.

I am very interested in this project and I'd love to extend and contribute to it, but only if it's an actual open source project. Seems like every devtools-focused startup these days calls themselves "open source" but fails to actually build a community, because in reality it's just a marketing gimmick. Because the project is actually a company, the people involved never try very hard to build a community of contributors. When the company invariably cannot make money with an open source product, the code gets relicensed to be closed-source. The few people who had contributed end up getting played. That's what happened to Sourcegraph!

So: open source, or open source "for now"?

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41715776

[1]: https://github.com/sourcegraph/sourcegraph-public-snapshot/c...

[2]: https://github.com/peterldowns

[spmurrayzzz → peterldowns]

Not the author, but given that this is a relatively small UI wrapper of a zoekt[1] backend, it seems like the risk here is isolated to the upstream Sourcegraph-maintained search dependency. By relatively small, I mean that the total SLOC for UI code in the entire project is around ~3.5k (compared to the backend which is currently 25x the size). Seems difficult to ascribe any enterprise motivations given that and additionally the UI seems very useful as-is even if you had to fork it and build a new community from there.

[1] https://github.com/sourcegraph/zoekt

[peterldowns → spmurrayzzz]

There's not really "risk" either way, I'm a fan of open source and I'm also a fan of businesses making money, I just don't want to donate time and energy to a business.

What they've described smells a lot like a thing that needs to become a business — see Sourcegraph — and Brendan [0] and Michael [1] are currently working together at a startup they founded.

I'm getting tired of seeing other businesses pissing in the pool by claiming to be "open source" purely for the marketing benefits, so I figured I'd ask up front and see what they say.

Should be a simple answer either way!

[0]: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brendan-kellam/

[1]: https://www.linkedin.com/in/msukkari/

[spmurrayzzz → peterldowns]

Yea I think I understand your motivation re: not donating your time. I guess my assumption was more-so that the likelihood of 3k SLOC UI project becoming a business seemed incredibly remote. Perhaps that is misguided.

[bshzzle → peterldowns]

Thanks for the thoughtful question.

This is still day 1, so we honestly don't have an answer if we will get to a point where we can monetize - it's too early to tell. However if we do end up going down that road, I don't think generating revenue and being a good steward of open source is mutually exclusive.

My view is that there is a balance that can exist between open source and building a profitable business that doesn't negatively impact the open source community. Companies that come to mind that I think are striking this balance are PostHog & GitLab.

[peterldowns → bshzzle]

Thanks for the reply — to be clear, I understand your answer to be “this is a business but we’re not yet sure how we’ll make money.”

Great work so far; best of luck!

[hanwenn]

Hi!

sorry for not responding to your email, I was swamped.

I looked through the sourcecode, but I can only find UI (ie. browser) code. Does this do anything beyond delivering a more functional and prettier UI on top of an existing zoekt deployment? If no, everybody would be better served if you tried to improve the UI inside Zoekt, which currently is a live demonstration of (my lack of) web app programming skills.

Have you thought of how you will achieve your further goals (eg. semantic search)? That will require server-side changes, but you currently have no Go code at all.

[bshzzle → hanwenn]

Hey!

Yea that is correct - in its current state, it's functionally a UI wrapper on top of the zoekt-webserver api. One of the reasons why we decided to go with a separate app is that we have much more experience with Typescript, React, and NextJS (the web framework we are using), so it felt like we could move allot quicker using what we know.

In terms of semantic search, that is still very early days - my intuition is that having a separate "semantic code indexer" server written in Python would again allow us to move quickly (since all of the ML libraries are written in Python).

[blagund → hanwenn]

As for just a UI over Zoekt, let me plug https://github.com/TreeTide/underhood/tree/develop#getting-s.... Uses https://github.com/TreeTide/zoekt-underhood.

[peterldowns → blagund]

There's also Neogrok, which is quite nice!

https://github.com/isker/neogrok

https://neogrok-demo-web.fly.dev/

[maxloh → blagund]

Zoekt already has its own UI, though it is very feature-limited and lacks syntax highlighting. Demo: https://cs.bazel.build/

If you’re curious about the source, as I was, here it is: https://github.com/sourcegraph/zoekt/blob/main/web/templates...

[morgante]

Awesome to see another open source player in the space, especially after Sourcegraph went closed source.

It looks like you're working on this full-time (and it's a lot of work to build great code search, as I know from working on my own product).

What are your plans for monetizing / building a sustainable business without inevitably going closed source like Sourcegraph?

[bshzzle → morgante]

Currently, we don't have any plans of monetizing - the main focus for us right now is building something that people want to use :)

[peterldowns → bshzzle]

Do you plan on eventually attempting to monetize in some way, or is this open source as in free software as in you legitimately are just creating a new open source project?

I understand intentions can change, but there's a difference, and I'm curious to know the answer.

[quest88 → bshzzle]

In lieu of money, how do you know you're building the right thing? For me, money is a good indicator you're building the right thing and solving the right problem.

[threecheese]

Regarding your response to “why not use an IDE?”; do you have any other product-like use cases interest you? The one you mention - search across many repositories - makes a lot of sense for organizations with (for example) a Github Enterprise installation and want to investigate or make changes across multiple components. This is definitely relevant to me, and so I wonder what other cool things can I do with it?

[bshzzle → threecheese]

I think in the immediate term, we would like to talk to as many people as we can that have this "search across many repos" problem such that we can dial in the core search experience.

Looking beyond the immediate, I think there is allot of fertile ground with respect to making engineering teams more efficient beyond just regular code search. Semantic code search for example is one of those features that I really wish I had when I was at my last job - would have made onboarding onto new codebases much easier.

Would love to hear more about your use cases: brendan@sourcebot.dev

[awenix]

Another solid code search tool https://github.com/hound-search/hound.

Based on regexp

[maxloh → awenix]

It seems to be unmaintained. The last commit was more than a year ago.

[imp0cat → maxloh]

Yeah, it's quite old ( https://www.etsy.com/codeascraft/announcing-hound-a-lightnin... - 2015) Sourcegraph has a more polished interface, Hound is very bare in comparison.

However, Hound does the job well.

[mdaniel]

I'll point out that you're missing a stellar opportunity to showcase your own champagne via

  --- a/README.md
  +++ b/README.md
  @@ -1,256 +1,256 @@
  - We do not collect or transmit [any information related to your codebase](https://github.com/search?q=repo:sourcebot-dev/sourcebot++captureEvent&type=code)
  + We do not collect or transmit [any information related to your codebase](https://demo.sourcebot.dev/search?query=repo%3Asourcebot-dev%2Fsourcebot%20captureEvent)

which regrettably currently says "No results found" :-(

[smarx007 → mdaniel]

https://demo.sourcebot.dev/search?query=repo%3ATaqlaAI%2Fsou...

but there are a few things that need fixing, at least repo redirects and case-insensitive `repo:` arguments.

[bshzzle → mdaniel]

I like this idea! Will fix this in a sec.

[maxloh]

Why not just fork Sourcegraph, instead of building the product from the ground up?

[IshKebab]

Nice! Still not quite as good as grep.app from an interface point of view. They have instant search-as-you-type results over all of GitHub.

It's not open source but I use it all the time. Far superior to Github's search.

[richardw → IshKebab]

Anyone know how companies like this maintain tabs on so much of the GitHub repos? I assume very distributed crawling/cloning.

[mdaniel → richardw]

I'd use their "firehose" API if I were doing it: <https://docs.github.com/en/rest/activity/events?apiVersion=2...> and <https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/api/events.html#list-a-projects-v...>

I don't have experience to know if that's cheaper (for the hoster) than just periodically calling the $(git fetch --mirror) endpoint. I could see opening a conversation with the major providers asking which they would prefer, since it's in everyone's best interest to not unduely hammer them

[richardw → mdaniel]

Excellent thank you. Those look like events on a specific resource rather than “firehose” which sounds more like a global events list. Everything GitHub has a quota so there’s no way companies are staying under the normal 5000 or 15000 limit to fetch all of the changes!

[mdaniel → richardw]

Based on my understanding, yes, the events are global and it is a firehose. The burden would be upon the consumer to drop messages not relevant to the repos it is watching, but almost certainly less heartache than trying to add individual subscriptions for thousands(?) of repos. The GitLab one seems less firehose-y but for this specific problem would still likely help not hammer them

To the best of my knowledge, any such quotas are per API key. It's possible they are per account, but creating accounts is free.

Also, any such mechanism would only be to advise the sync process that a commit (or push) had occurred, and it would still use the $(git fetch --mirror) process but would just be an optimization of not running it (all the time|too infrequently)

[jmakov]

Can somebody share the use case of this? Why not just use your IDE?

[bshzzle → jmakov]

yea it's a fair question - an IDE is often more convenient when you have the code checked-out locally. This becomes a pain when you work in a organization with potentially hundreds of repositories that you need to search across (e.g., a org stores their 100+ microservices in separate repos, and you need to find all places where they make a request to your service).

[Hackbraten → bshzzle]

I use ghorg in tandem with ripgrep to address that problem. The former is for checking out the main branches of all repositories, the latter to perform the actual search.

[eptcyka → jmakov]

I cannot run Xcode on Linux, I cannot run Visual Studio on Linux, I might not have an IDE set up for the language that I want to inspect. Many reasons. Also, some languages practically require arbitrary code execution to make a build, which I'd much prefer to shove into an isolated VM.

[metadaemon → jmakov]

Finding examples of how others implement similar logic is my biggest use case for code searching, but since GitHub copied SourceGraph, I don't have much of a need for these self-hosted solutions.

[rafaelgoncalves → metadaemon]

yeah, github has a nice search now, the only complaint is that you need to be logged on to use, besides this is really nice.

[metaroxx]

How would this work if you want to index different branches of a repository only?

For example I’d like to index branches release1, release2, etc. but not have it index developer temporary gitlab MR branches.

I assume HEAD is referred to the head of the default branch when cloning the repository.

[zdw]

Does this make a copy of each repo on ingest?

Can it work against in-place repos, for example if hosted on the same server as a code forge installation?

[bshzzle → zdw]

Yea exactly - on ingest it clones the repos and will periodically fetch new revisions.

Currently we don't support in-place repos, but feel free to file a issue and we'd be happy to take a look.

[planb]

Great work! Any plans to add Gitea/Forgejo (self-hosted) support?

[bshzzle → planb]

Thanks! Yea we would definitely like to support more code-hosts. If you have a sec, could you open a issue so we can track it?

[planb → bshzzle]

Looks like someone else already did that: https://github.com/sourcebot-dev/sourcebot/issues/13

[schreiaj]

Can you add repos after starting the container? What about persisting indexes across restarts?

Still, neat. Glad to have an easy to deploy open source tool like this.

[bshzzle → schreiaj]

Yes - there is a file watcher that should pickup modifications to the configuration file.

And you can persist indexes across restarts by mounting a volume to the `/data` directory (e.g., `-v $(pwd):/data`). Indexes are stored in a `.sourcebot` cache directory.

Thanks for the interest!

[acloudbutwhy]

What sort of effort is required for additional host types? I see an issue is opened for self-hosted Bitbucket which would be a blocker for me to try it.

[mattfat5]

This is well done thanks for the share.

[ashobeiri]

This is really exciting. Happy to see someone building an open source solution in this space

[TavsiE9s]

Any plans for non Github/Gitlab integrations? Gitea/Gogs/etc. maybe?

[bshzzle → TavsiE9s]

yes definitely - mind opening a issue so we can track it?

[ergocoder]

What a milestone. SourceGraph is big enough to have its own open source clone

[cprogrammer]

Does it support Perforce? i couldn't find it in the schema in the repo.

[bshzzle → cprogrammer]

No just GitLab and GitHub atm - but please feel free to file an issue for Perforce support.

[cprogrammer → bshzzle]

Thanks, will do.

[j4coh]

Cool to see someone carrying on the dream after SourceGraph lost their way.

[bastawhiz → j4coh]

I haven't followed SG closely. Other than licensing, what have they done to fall out of favor?

[Starlevel004 → bastawhiz]

They started aggressively pushing their (bad) copilot competitor.

[Squarex → Starlevel004]

What's wrong with Cody? I find it better than Copilot.

[selimthegrim → bastawhiz]

People were criticizing their hiring and salary structure too recently

[asdev]

sourcegraph is dead with advent of LLMs and AI coding tools right? Github cross repo search is also not bad anymore

[esafak → asdev]

Wrong. Unless you want to feed the LLM your entire codebase, which is usually infeasible, you need to be able to retrieve relevant context, which relies on understanding the codebase, as Sourcegraph does. Sourcegraph has a product that does precisely this, called Cody.