Self-hosted code search that answers questions and cites sources

What it does

Sourcebot is a self-hosted web app that indexes your repositories to help both humans and agents make sense of sprawling code. It offers fast regex search across all repos and branches, plus an Ask Sourcebot feature that lets you pose natural-language questions. Answers come with inline citations and navigable code snippets, while a built-in file explorer provides syntax highlighting and IDE-level navigation like goto-definition.

The interesting bit

Instead of stuffing your entire codebase into a context window, Ask Sourcebot uses the project’s own search and navigation tools as a reasoning layer—allowing models to look up references, follow definitions, and ground their answers in actual code rather than hallucinating module boundaries.

Key highlights

• Self-hosted via Docker Compose.
• Cross-repo, cross-branch search with regex, boolean logic, and language filters.
• IDE-level code navigation—goto definition and find references—across every indexed repo.
• Ask Sourcebot grounds reasoning-model answers in search results, delivering inline citations and navigable snippets.
• Anonymous usage telemetry is collected by default, though the README notes you can disable it with an environment variable.

Caveats

• Building from source is explicitly labeled contributor-only; end users are expected to use the Docker Compose route.
• Anonymous telemetry is opt-out rather than opt-in.

Verdict

Teams juggling repos across multiple code hosts and craving a private, citation-aware assistant should try this; solo developers living inside a single IDE probably don’t need another web layer.