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/.
livegrep builds using bazel. You will need to install a fairly recent version: as of this writing we test on bazel 0.25.
livegrep vendors and/or fetches all of its dependencies using bazel,
and so should only require a relatively recent C++ compiler to build.
Once you have those dependencies, you can build using
bazel build //...
Note that the initial build will download around 100M of dependencies. These will be cached once downloaded.
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:
bazel-bin/src/tools/codesearch -grpc localhost:9999 doc/examples/livegrep/index.json
In another, run livegrep:
bazel-bin/cmd/livegrep/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 and to not launch
a search server via the -index_only flag:
bazel-bin/src/tools/codesearch -index_only -dump_index livegrep.idx doc/examples/livegrep/index.json
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:
bazel-bin/src/tools/codesearch -load_index livegrep.idx -grpc localhost:9999
The schema for the codesearch configuration file defined using
protobuf in src/proto/config.proto.
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:
bazel-bin/cmd/livegrep-github-reindex/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.
I build docker images for livegrep out of the livegrep.com repository, based on build images created by this repository's CI. They should be generally usable. For instance, to build+run a livegrep index of this repository, you could run:
docker run -v $(pwd):/data livegrep/indexer /livegrep/bin/livegrep-github-reindex -repo livegrep/livegrep -http -dir /data
docker network create livegrep
docker run -v $(pwd):/data --network livegrep livegrep/base /livegrep/bin/codesearch -load_index /data/livegrep.idx -grpc 0.0.0.0:9999
docker run -d --network livegrep --publish 8910:8910 livegrep/base /livegrep/bin/livegrep -docroot /livegrep/web -listen=0.0.0.0:8910
And then access http://localhost:8910/
You can also find the docker-compose config powering livegrep.com in that same repository.
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.
The index file will vary somewhat in size, but will usually be 3-5x
the size of the indexed text. livegrep memory-maps the index file
into RAM, so it can work out of index files larger than (available)
RAM, but will perform better if the file can be loaded entirely into
memory. Barring that, keeping the disk on fast SSDs is recommended for
optimal performance.
Livegrep is open source. See COPYING for more information.