Migrate from Sourcegraph

Sourcegraph discontinued the individual/indie tier in July 2025. If you were using Sourcegraph for code search and navigation on a self-hosted or cloud account, this guide walks through replicating that workflow with Canopy.

What changes

The biggest practical difference: Canopy runs entirely locally. There’s no server to run, no Docker container to maintain, no cloud account required. The index lives in .canopy/index/ inside your repo and is updated incrementally as files change.

Feature mapping:

Sourcegraph	Canopy equivalent
Code search (literal)	canopy search <query> / canopy_search
Code search (regex)	canopy search <pattern> --regex / canopy_search with regex
Structural search	canopy pattern <ast-grep pattern> / canopy_pattern_search
”Find references”	canopy_trace_dependents
”Go to definition”	canopy_search_symbols <symbol>
Cross-repo search	Index each repo separately; search each with separate MCP server
Code navigation in browser	Use with Claude Code, Cursor, or Zed for in-editor navigation
Batch changes	Not available — Canopy is a read-only intelligence tool
Insights/metrics	canopy stats, canopy_architecture_map for structural metrics

Step 1: Install Canopy

curl -fsSL https://downloads.canopy.ironpinelabs.com/releases/latest/forge-linux-x86_64 \
  -o canopy
chmod +x canopy
sudo mv canopy /usr/local/bin/canopy
canopy --version

See Install Canopy for all platforms and Gatekeeper handling on macOS.

Step 2: Index your repo

cd /path/to/your/repo
canopy index . --with-search --with-git

--with-search enables full-text search (the Sourcegraph equivalent). --with-git adds git history to canopy_prepare results.

For large repos (>10K files), indexing takes 30–120 seconds. Subsequent incremental runs are much faster — typically under 5 seconds.

Step 3: Connect to your editor

If you used Sourcegraph’s browser-based code navigation, the closest equivalent is connecting Canopy to your editor via MCP:

• Set Up Canopy with Claude Code
• Set Up Canopy with Cursor
• Set Up Canopy with Zed
• Set Up Canopy with VS Code + Continue

Once connected, you can ask your AI assistant to search and navigate using Canopy tools directly.

Step 4: Replicate your searches

Literal search:

Sourcegraph: repo:^github\.com/myorg/myrepo$ checkout

Canopy CLI:

canopy search "checkout"

Canopy MCP (in editor):

Use canopy_search with query="checkout"

Regex search:

Sourcegraph: repo:^github\.com/myorg/myrepo$ /createPayment\(.*\)/

Canopy CLI:

canopy search "createPayment\(.*\)" --regex

Structural search:

Sourcegraph structural: console.log(...)

Canopy pattern (ast-grep syntax):

canopy pattern "console.log($$$)" --language javascript

Find all references to a function:

Sourcegraph: “Find references” on a symbol in the UI

Canopy MCP:

Use canopy_trace_dependents on src/lib/payments.ts

Canopy CLI:

# Find all files that import payments.ts
canopy health --show-dependents src/lib/payments.ts

Activate a license (optional)

Canopy Community tier supports 1 repo and basic CLI tools — sufficient for personal projects. For multi-repo support and the full 21 MCP tools, activate a license:

canopy activate <your-license-key>

A 14-day free trial is available at canopy.ironpinelabs.com. Card required upfront; no charge until day 15.

What Canopy doesn’t have

Be aware of these gaps before migrating:

• Cross-repo search in a single query — Canopy indexes each repo separately. You can’t search across 50 repos with one query the way Sourcegraph Enterprise supported. Workaround: use a monorepo index if your repos are related.
• Web UI — Canopy has no browser interface. Results come through the CLI or your editor’s AI assistant.
• Batch changes — Canopy is a read-only intelligence tool. It doesn’t write code.
• Saved searches / code monitors — No persistent search subscriptions. Run searches on demand or in CI.

Tip

If you need cross-repo web-based search, Sourcegraph’s self-hosted Community Edition (open source, Apache 2.0) remains available for self-hosting. Canopy and Sourcegraph CE can coexist — use Canopy for AI-assisted coding and Sourcegraph CE for cross-repo browser search.

Common pitfalls

Search returns too many results Sourcegraph defaulted to repo-scoped search. Canopy searches the entire indexed tree. Add --include to scope results:

canopy search "checkout" --include "src/**/*.ts"

“Index not found” after indexing Canopy stores the index relative to the path passed to canopy index. If you indexed /home/you/repos/myapp, start canopy serve with the same path. Running canopy serve . from a different working directory won’t find the index.

Related guides

• Install Canopy
• Set Up Canopy with Claude Code
• Multi-Language Repo