Simon Willison’s Weblog

26th May 2025 - Link Blog

GitHub Issues search now supports nested queries and boolean operators: Here’s how we (re)built it. GitHub Issues got a significant search upgrade back in January. Deborah Digges provides some behind the scene details about how it works and how they rolled it out.

The signature new feature is complex boolean logic: you can now search for things like is:issue state:open author:rileybroughten (type:Bug OR type:Epic), up to five levels of nesting deep.

Queries are parsed into an AST using the Ruby parslet PEG grammar library. The AST is then compiled into a nested Elasticsearch bool JSON query.

GitHub Issues search deals with around 2,000 queries a second so robust testing is extremely important! The team rolled it out invisibly to 1% of live traffic, running the new implementation via a queue and competing the number of results returned to try and spot any degradations compared to the old production code.