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.
The simplest way to invoke livegrep is to use the codeseach binary
directly, in "CLI" mode, for interactive use on the command line. To
start searching a repository:
bin/codesearch -cli .
In order to index a repository once and save the index for fast
startup later, you can use the -load_index and -dump_index flags.
bin/codesearch -cli -dump_index livegrep.idx .
Will index this repository and save the index into livegrep.idx. You
can then re-use that index file later:
bin/codesearch -cli -load_index livegrep.idx
With -load_index, only the index file is looked at -- the original
git repositories need not even be present on the filesystem, and any
positional arguments to the command are discarded.
For programmatic use, leaving off -cli runs in a JSON interface
mode. In this mode, a single position argument is expected, which is a
JSON configuration file specifying which repositories and revisions to
index. You can find a trivial example at
doc/examples/livegrep/index.json.
You can also provide -listen proto://host:port to make codesearch
start a server and listen on a port for incoming connections. This is
needed to run codesearch as a backend for the livegrep frontend.
In order to run the livegrep web interface, you need one or more
codesearch backends listening on TCP ports for livegrep to connect
to. livegrep expects a JSON configuration file as a single
positional argument; See
doc/examples/livegrep/server.json for an example, and
server/config/config.go for documentation of available
options.
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 -logtostderr doc/examples/livegrep/server.json
In a browser, now visit http://localhost:8910/, and you should see a working livegrep.
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.