hound

README

Hound

Hound is an extremely fast source code search engine. The core is based on this article (and code) from Russ Cox: Regular Expression Matching with a Trigram Index. Hound itself is a static React frontend that talks to a Go backend. The backend keeps an up-to-date index for each repository and answers searches through a minimal API. Here it is in action:

Quick Start Guide

Preferred Method

This is the preferred approach, since the binaries are generally easier to work with, and make will build both the server and the CLI binaries at the same time.

1. Clone the repo: git clone https://github.com/etsy/Hound.git
2. Edit config-example.json to add the repos you want: cd Hound && vim config-example.json
3. Rename the (now edited) config file: mv config-example.json config.json
4. make
5. ./bin/houndd
6. See Hound in action in your browser at http://localhost:6080/

Using only Go tools.

Alternatively, you can avoid the use of make and just use go tools.

1. Clone the repo: git clone https://github.com/etsy/Hound.git
2. Edit config-example.json to add the repos you want: cd Hound && vim config-example.json
3. Rename the (now edited) config file: mv config-example.json config.json
4. Set your GOPATH: export GOPATH=`pwd`
5. Run the server: go run src/hound/cmds/houndd/main.go
6. See Hound in action in your browser at http://localhost:6080/

Why can't I use go get?

That's coming, we just need to make it easier to bundle the javascript/css assets so it all works seamlessly.

Why Another Code Search Tool?

We've used many similar tools in the past, and most of them are either too slow, too hard to configure, or require too much software to be installed. Which brings us to...

Requirements

Hard Requirements

• Go 1.3+

Optional, Recommended Software

• Make (for building the binaries, not strictly required)
• nodejs (for the command line react-tools)

Yup, that's it. You can proxy requests to the Go service through Apache/nginx/etc., but that's not required.

Docker

• docker 1.4+

You should follow the quickstart guide up to step (3) and then run:

$ docker build . -t houndd
$ docker run -it --rm -p 0.0.0.0:6080:6080 --name houndd houndd

You should be able to navigate to http://localhost:6080/ as usual.

Support

Currently Hound is only tested on MacOS and CentOS, but it should work on any *nix system. There is no plan to support Windows, and we've heard that it fails to compile on Windows, but we would be happy to accept a PR that fixes this!

Right now Hound supports git and mercurial, and SVN support is being added.

Private Repositories

There are a couple of ways to get Hound to index private repositories:

• Use the file:// protocol. This allows you to index any local folder, so you can clone the repository locally and then reference the files directly. The downside here is that the polling to keep the repo up to date will not work.
• Use SSH style URLs in the config: "url" : "git@github.com:foo/bar.git". As long as you have your SSH keys set up on the box where Hound is running this will work. There is currently an issue with URLs in this case that we hope to fix soon.

Editor Integration

Currently the following editors have plugins that support Hound:

• Sublime Text

Hacking on Hound

Building

make

This will build ./bin/houndd which is the server binary and ./bin/hound which is the command line client.

Running in development

./bin/houndd

This will start up the combined server and indexer. The first time you start the server, it will take a bit of time to initialize your data directory with the repository data. You can access the web frontend at http://localhost:6080/

Running in production

./bin/houndd --prod --addr=address:port

The will start up the combined server/indexer and build all static assets in production mode. The default addr is ":6080", and thus the --addr flag can be used to have the server listen on a different port.

Get in Touch

IRC: #codeascraft on freenode

Created at Etsy by:

• Kelly Norton
• Jonathan Klein