Article version: Enterprise Server 2.15

This version of GitHub Enterprise will be discontinued on This version of GitHub Enterprise was discontinued on 2019-10-16. No patch releases will be made, even for critical security issues. For better performance, improved security, and new features, upgrade to the latest version of GitHub Enterprise. For help with the upgrade, contact GitHub Enterprise support.

Searching users

You can search for users on GitHub Enterprise and narrow the results using these user search qualifiers in any combination.

You can search for users globally across all of GitHub Enterprise. For more information, see "About searching on GitHub."

Tips:

  • This article contains example searches on the GitHub.com website, but you can use the same search filters on your GitHub Enterprise Server instance.
  • For a list of search syntaxes that you can add to any search qualifier to further improve your results, see "Understanding the search syntax".
  • Use quotations around multi-word search terms. For example, if you want to search for issues with the label "In progress," you'd search for label:"in progress". Search is not case sensitive.

In this article:

Search only users or organizations

By default, searching users will return both personal and organizations. However, you can use the type qualifier to restrict search results to personal accounts or organizations only.

Qualifier Example
type:user mike in:name created:<2011-01-01 type:user matches personal accounts named "mike" that were created before 2011.
type:org data in:email type:org matches organizations with the word "data" in their email.

Search by account name, full name, or public email

You can filter your search to the personal user or organization account name with user or org qualifiers.

With the in qualifier you can restrict your search to the username (login), full name, public email, or any combination of these. When you omit this qualifier, only the username and email address are searched. For privacy reasons, you cannot search by email domain name.

Qualifier Example
user:name user:octocat matches the user with the username "octocat".
org:name org:electron type:users matches the Electron organization's account name.
in:login kenya in:login matches users with the word "kenya" in their username.
in:name bolton in:name matches users whose real name contains the word "bolton."
fullname:firstname lastname fullname:nat friedman matches a user with the full name "Nat Friedman." Note: This search qualifier is sensitive to spacing.
in:email data in:email matches users with the word "data" in their email.

Search by number of repositories a user owns

You can filter users based on the number of repositories they own, using the repos qualifier and greater than, less than, and range qualifiers.

Qualifier Example
repos:n repos:>9000 matches users whose repository count is over 9,000.
bert repos:10..30 matches users with the word "bert" in their username or real name who own 10 to 30 repositories.

Search by location

You can search for users by the location indicated in their profile.

Qualifier Example
location:LOCATION repos:1 location:iceland matches users with exactly one repository that live in Iceland.

Search by repository language

Using the language qualifier you can search for users based on the languages of repositories they own.

Qualifier Example
language:LANGUAGE language:javascript location:russia matches users in Russia with a majority of their repositories written in JavaScript.
jenny language:javascript in:fullname matches users with JavaScript repositories whose full name contains the word "jenny."

Search by when a user account was created

You can filter users based on when they joined GitHub Enterprise with the created qualifier. This takes a date as its parameter. Date formatting must follow the ISO8601 standard, which is YYYY-MM-DD (year-month-day). You can also add optional time information THH:MM:SS+00:00 after the date, to search by the hour, minute, and second. That's T, followed by HH:MM:SS (hour-minutes-seconds), and a UTC offset (+00:00).

Dates support greater than, less than, and range qualifiers.

Qualifier Example
created:YYYY-MM-DD created:<2011-01-01 matches users that joined before 2011.
created:>=2013-05-11 matches users that joined at or after May 11th, 2013.
created:2013-03-06 location:london matches users that joined on March 6th, 2013, who list their location as London.
created:2010-01-01..2011-01-01 john in:login matches users that joined between 2010 and 2011 with the word "john" in their username.

Search by number of followers

You can filter users based on the number of followers that they have, using the followers qualifier with greater than, less than, and range qualifiers.

Qualifier Example
followers:n followers:>=1000 matches users with 1,000 or more followers.
sparkle followers:1..10 matches users with between 1 and 10 followers, with the word "sparkle" in their name.

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