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Searching History

VersionPress has powerful search with syntax inspired by GitHub or Gmail. It lets you filter the main table by authors, post types, date ranges etc.

Note

Search is available since VersionPress 3.0

Examples

Let's start with a couple of examples.

hello world
Finds changes that have the words "hello" and "world" somewhere in the change description (commit message).

hello world author:joe
Search operators are supported, e.g., author:. The search is always case insensitive so this will find 'Joe', 'JOE' etc.

hello world author: joe* date:">= 2016-01-01"
Here you can see a couple of syntax rules in play: you can combine as many operators as you like, wildcards are supported, value containing spaces must be quoted, there are optional spaces after the colon, etc.

Syntax

just text, "just text", w*ldcards
Searches the commit text. Without quotes, it will look for commits containing all the words. With quotes, it does a strict match (still case in-sensitive). Single and double quotes are both supported.

operator: value
Space after colon is optional. Value can be quoted and wildcarded as above.

operator:value1 operator:value2
Operators can be repeated, their values are then combined using logical OR. For example, you can search for changes done by either Adam or Betty by using author:Adam author:Betty. The only exception is date: which is AND'd, see below.

operator1:value operator2:value
Multiple operators are combined using logical AND.

--

All of the syntaxes above can be freely combined.

Operators

author:

Author of the action. You can use author name or his/her email, wildcards are supported.

There are two special authors:

  • author:nonadmin@example.com finds anonymous actions like posting a comment on a blog.
  • author:wp-cli finds actions done via WP-CLI.

date:

Commit date. Recommended format is YYYY-MM-DD, e.g., date: 2016-01-01, but anything that can be parsed by strtotime() is supported. You can use greater than / less than operators such as date: >=2016-01-01 or a range operator .., for example, date: 2016-01-01..2016-02-01. Either boundary can be replaced with a wildcard, e.g., date: 2016-01-01..*.

The date: operator has currently some limitations:

  • Time portion is ignored.
  • Repeating this operator is tricky and we recommend using only a single date: at a time. For example, if you searched for date:2016-01-01 date:2016-01-02 you might expect to see commits from both of the dates, but the result would be empty because date: uses logical AND due to technical limitations. You could use the AND logic for something like date:>2016-01-01 date:<2016-02-01 but we recommend you use the range operator instead.
  • You cannot search for two date periods with a gap between them. The range must be continuous.

entity:, action:, vpid:

All actions tracked by VersionPress are done on some entity (post, user, option, postmeta etc.), the action is something like create or delete and every entity has a unique ID, something like 126BBC0541B14B528C623E32EE1B497C. You can search for these using the operators above, most commonly by entity or action.

We currently don't have a good way to generate the definitive list of supported entities, you can see them in the commit messages when using a standard Git client but it's not ideal. We'll have a better way to document this in the future.

arbitrary-vp-tag:

VP tags are pieces of metadata that VersionPress stores with each commit. For example, updating the site title creates a commit message like this:

[VP] Edited option 'blogname'

VP-Action: option/edit/blogname

X-VP-Version: 3.0
X-VP-Environment: staging

You can search for VP tags, either in a full form or without the VP- / X-VP- prefix. Some examples that will work equally fine against the commit above are:

  • environment: staging
  • X-VP-Environment: staging
  • VP-environment: STAGING
  • action: option/edit/blogname
  • VP-Action: option/edit/*
  • Action: */edit/*
  • vp-version: 3.0

VP-Action actually gets a bit of a treatment because it is also an operator (see above) and quite useful. You can skip the /* wildcard as that is added automatically so something like action: option/edit will just work.

Current limitations

Search in 3.0 does not support negative search. You cannot say something like "author is NOT Joe".