Claude Code's Grep tool should use --no-require-git for non-git repos that still use .gitignore files

[ejc3]

Problem

Claude Code's Grep tool doesn't respect .gitignore files in Mercurial repositories because ripgrep by default only honors .gitignore when a .git directory is present.

This causes large amounts of unwanted results from directories like node_modules/, vendor/, dist/, etc. that would normally be filtered by .gitignore patterns.

Impact

In large monorepos (like Meta's fbsource which uses Mercurial) that uses .gitignore files, Grep searches return massive results from ignored directories:

• Searches that should return ~10 files return 1000+ files
• Search results include minified JavaScript, build artifacts, vendored code
• This significantly impacts usability and performance

Root Cause

Ripgrep's default behavior requires a .git directory to respect .gitignore files. From the ripgrep documentation:

By default, ripgrep will only respect filter rules from source control ignore files when ripgrep detects that the search is executed inside a source control repository. For example, when a .git directory is observed.

Mercurial uses .hg directories, not .git, so .gitignore files are ignored.

Solution

Ripgrep added the --no-require-git flag specifically for this use case (see ripgrep#1414).

From ripgrep's help:

--no-require-git
    When this flag is given, source control ignore files such as .gitignore
    are respected even if no git repository is present.

Claude Code should pass --no-require-git when invoking ripgrep to support:

1. Mercurial repositories that use .gitignore files
2. Git repositories that have been archived/copied without .git directory
3. Perforce repositories using .gitignore files
4. Any repository structure using .gitignore for filtering

Workaround

Users can create a .rgignore file at the repository root with the same patterns as .gitignore. Ripgrep always respects .rgignore files regardless of repository type.

However, this requires duplicating ignore rules and isn't a sustainable solution for large repositories with many .gitignore files.

Implementation

The fix should be straightforward - add --no-require-git to the ripgrep invocation in Claude Code's Grep tool.

Environment

• Claude Code version: 2.0.13
• Bundled ripgrep version: 14.1.1
• Repository type: Mercurial (.hg)
• Uses .gitignore files: Yes

[ejc3]

Another approach is to make it easy to customize how rg is called. If we could specify arguments or just the settings file, we’d have what we need.

[danberindei]

@ejc3 this worked for me:

I set --no-require-git in ~/.ripgreprc.

I told Claude Code to use it via ~/.claude/settings.json:

    "USE_BUILTIN_RIPGREP": "0",
    "RIPGREP_CONFIG_PATH": "/home/dan/.ripgreprc"

I also told it via CLAUDE.md to prefer rg to grep.

The weird part is I'm using Git, but before this Search was still looking inside the .git directory and finding a lot of rerere cache files in there.

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