Finding uses of an API with the new GitHub Code Search#

The GitHub Code Search beta is really powerful - it allows advanced search - including regular expression matches - against every public repo on GitHub.

It’s still in a preview (December 2022) - you can request access here.

Today I used it to figure out who was using a specific internal API from Datasette that I’m considering changing for Datasette 1.0.

The API is the permission_allowed(self, actor, action, resource=None, default=False) method - it’s intended to be used by plugins that need to check if a user has permission to perform a specific action.

I use it a lot in my own plugins, but I wanted to see if anyone else was using it for theirs.

After some perusing of their documentation I came up with this:

datasette permission_allowed -user:simonw -path:datasette/** -path:docs/** -path:tests/** language:python

• datasette permission_allowed searches for files that use both of those terms. I could also have used ".permission_allowed(" to find things that are definitely method calls - or crafted a regular expression - but for this search just the keywords worked fine.
• -user:simonw filters out everything from my own repos - I write a lot of plugins that use this, but I didn’t want to see those in the search results
• -path:datasette/** filters out anything in a file within a datasette/ parent folder. Without this my search was returning results from forks of my own simonw/datasette repository, which I didn’t want to see. I was hoping I could exclude -repo:*/datasette or similar but that’s not currently supported.
• -path:docs/** -path:tests/** do the same thing but for mentions in docs/ or tests/ root dirctories.
• language:python restricts the results to Python files (presumably .py and .ipynb and similar).

If you have access to the beta you can try that search here.

See also my research notes in this issue.