Livegrep is a tool, partially inspired by Google Code Search, for interactive regex search of ~gigabyte-scale source repositories. You can see a running instance at http://livegrep.com/.
This respository contains three separate components: The indexing and search backend (written in C++), the web interface (server in golang, UI, obviously, in Javascript), and a CLI that talks to the web interface. These each need to be built separately.
The C++ backend had a number of dependencies, including:
On a sufficiently recent Ubuntu, these are all available via apt-get:
sudo apt-get install libgflags-dev libgit2-dev libjson0-dev libboost-system-dev libboost-filesystem-dev libsparsehash-dev cmake golang
I have also made packages available in a PPA, but they are largely unmaintained since I no longer deploy livegrep on any older distributions.
Once all the dependencies are installed, a simple make should build
all of the binaries into the bin/ directory.
To run livegrep, you need to invoke both the codesearch backend
index/search process, and the livegrep web interface.
To run the sample web interface over livegrep itself, once you have
built both codesearch and livegrep:
In one terminal, start the codesearch server like so:
bin/codesearch -listen tcp://localhost:9999 doc/examples/livegrep/index.json
In another, run livegrep:
bin/livegrep
In a browser, now visit http://localhost:8910/, and you should see a working livegrep.
The codesearch binary is responsible for reading source code,
maintaining an index, and handling searches. livegrep is stateless
and relies only on the connection to codesearch over a TCP
connection.
By default, codesearch will build an in-memory index over the
repositories specified in its configuration file. You can, however,
also instruct it to save the index to a file on disk. This the dual
advantages of allowing indexes that are too large to fit in RAM, and
of allowing an index file to be reused. You instruct codesearch to
generate an index file via the -dump_index flag:
bin/codesearch -dump_index livegrep.idx doc/examples/livegrep/index.json </dev/null
Once codeseach has built the index, this index file can be used for
future runs. Index files are standalone, and you no longer need access
to the source code repositories, or even a configuration file, once an
index has been built. You can just launch a search server like so:
bin/codesearch -load_index livegrep.idx -listen tcp://localhost:9999
The livegrep frontend expects an optional position argument
indicating a JSON configuration file; See
doc/examples/livegrep/server.json for an example, and
server/config/config.go for documentation of available
options.
By default, livegrep will connect to a single local codesearch
instance on port 9999, and listen for HTTP connections on port
8910.
livegrep includes a helper driver, livegrep-github-reindex, which
can automatically update and index selected github repositories. To
download and index all of my repositories (except for forks), storing
the repos in repos/ and writing nelhage.idx, you might run:
bin/livegrep-github-reindex -user=nelhage -forks=false -name=github.com/nelhage -out nelhage.idx
You can now use nelhage.idx as an argument to codesearch -load_index.
livegrep builds an index file of your source code, and then works entirely out of that index, with no further access to the original git repositories.
In general, the index file will be approximately the same size as the original source code. livegrep memory-maps the index file into RAM, so it should be able to work out of index files larger than (available) RAM, but will perform much better if the file can be loaded entirely into memory.
Livegrep is open source. See COPYING for more information.