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Codebeam

Search all your code. Even the line you just typed.

Codebeam is a self-hosted code search engine in a single binary. It indexes your local repositories and your GitHub/GitLab projects, keeps the index fresh automatically, and gives AI coding agents a fast, token-cheap way to find and read code.
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What is Codebeam?

Section titled “What is Codebeam?”

grep only sees the repository you have open. Cloud code-search products only see what you pushed. Codebeam sits in between: a small server you run yourself — on your laptop or on a shared machine — that indexes every repository you care about and answers searches in milliseconds.

Point it at local folders, public GitHub projects, or your private GitHub/GitLab repositories. Codebeam clones and indexes them with Zoekt (the trigram engine behind Sourcegraph), then keeps everything current on its own: local repositories are re-indexed within seconds of a file save, and remote ones are re-pulled on a schedule. When a search hit comes from a file you edited but haven’t committed, the result says so with a dirty badge — you always know whether you’re looking at reality or a snapshot.

The same index is available everywhere you work: a web UI for humans, and an MCP server, JSON API, and context-packing CLI for AI agents — so Claude Code or any other MCP client can search your codebase precisely instead of grepping through it one clone at a time.

More than text search

Regex and literal search with Zoekt query syntax, symbol search (find the definition, not the 200 usages), find references, and structural search — match code by AST shape, like if $ERR != nil { $$$ }, in 11 languages.

Always fresh, zero effort

Local repositories are watched and re-indexed on save — uncommitted changes are searchable within seconds. Remote repositories refresh on a schedule. No reindex button to remember.

Built for AI agents

An MCP server with eight retrieval tools (search, symbols, references, structural, file reading, repo stats), a codebeam ctx command that packs cited context for a prompt, and a JSON API. Every result carries a repo:path:line@commit citation an agent can verify.

From laptop to team

One binary, no external services. Run it privately on your machine, or deploy it for a team with GitHub/GitLab/OIDC sign-in, per-user repository permissions synced from the code host, and admin/member roles.

How it works

Section titled “How it works”

Codebeam is a single Go process with a data directory. When you add a repository, it clones it (remote) or reads it in place (local), builds a Zoekt index shard, and extracts symbols with Universal Ctags. Searches run against the shards; results link into a built-in code viewer with a symbol outline and find-references navigation. SQLite stores the metadata — users, repositories, permissions, jobs — and everything lives under one directory you can back up.

There is nothing else to operate: no database server, no search cluster, no message queue.

Pick your path

Section titled “Pick your path”