Zoekt
Zoekt is a free, open-source text search engine built for source code.
What Zoekt is
Zoekt is a free, open-source text search engine built for source code. It supports substring and regular-expression searches, with Boolean operators for combining terms, and ranks results using code-related signals such as whether a match is on a symbol. Searches can cover a single repository or repositories across a larger codebase. The project says its trigram indexing and syntactic parsing work well with a variety of programming languages. Zoekt can be used through command-line tools or as indexserver and webserver services that sync repositories from a code host. Search is available through a web interface, a JSON API, and a gRPC API for structured queries and streaming results. The project documents indexing a GitHub organization and periodically fetching its repositories. Its published container image includes Zoekt binaries, git, and universal-ctags. Zoekt is licensed under Apache-2.0 and is intended for self-hosted use. The design document describes public-facing HTTPS deployment without authentication and identifies repository credentials, TLS certificates, and query logs as sensitive information.
Good
- Supports substring and regular-expression searches.
- Boolean operators combine search terms.
- Can search one repository or many.
- Provides JSON and gRPC APIs.
Watch out
- Designed for self-hosted deployment.
- Index shard content is capped at 1G.
- Public-facing HTTPS deployment is described without authentication.
Who it suits
Zoekt suits developers and teams that need code search across one or many repositories and can operate self-hosted tools or services. Its APIs may suit integrations that need structured or streaming search results.
Verdict
Zoekt provides code-focused search through command-line tools, web services, and APIs. Its self-hosted deployment and documented security considerations should be part of an implementation decision.
Plans and prices
From Zoekt's own pricing page, checked 7 Oct 2026.
| Plan | Price | What it gives you |
|---|---|---|
| Free | Free | Apache-2.0 licensed · self-hosted commands and services |
The facts
Each one read from Zoekt's own pages, with the date it was checked.
What it does
- API
- The webserver can expose a JSON search API and a gRPC API for structured queries and streaming search results.checked 7 Oct 2026
- Code host setup
- The README documents indexing a GitHub organization and periodically fetching and indexing its repositories.checked 7 Oct 2026
- Container
- The project publishes a container image at ghcr.io/sourcegraph/zoekt containing Zoekt binaries, git, and universal-ctags.checked 7 Oct 2026
- Index size limit
- The design document says shard offsets use uint32 and caps content size per shard at 1G.checked 7 Oct 2026
- Languages
- The project says its trigram indexing and syntactic parsing work well for a variety of programming languages.checked 7 Oct 2026
- License
- The repository lists the Apache-2.0 license.checked 7 Oct 2026
- Purpose
- Zoekt is a text search engine intended for source code.checked 7 Oct 2026
- Ranking
- Search results are ranked using code-related signals, including whether a match is on a symbol.checked 7 Oct 2026
- Repositories
- It can search an individual repository or search across many repositories in a large codebase.checked 7 Oct 2026
- Search
- It supports fast substring and regular expression matching, with Boolean query operators.checked 7 Oct 2026
- Security
- The design document describes a public-facing deployment using HTTPS without authentication and identifies repository credentials, TLS certificates, and query logs as sensitive data.checked 7 Oct 2026
- Security mitigation
- The design document says seccomp-based sandboxing mitigates the risk from ctags processing indexed code.checked 7 Oct 2026
- Ways to use it
- Zoekt can be used through command-line tools or through indexserver and webserver services that sync repositories from a code host and search them through a web UI or API.checked 7 Oct 2026
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