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
- Clone the repo:
git clone git@github.com:etsy/Hound.git
- Editconfig-example.json to add the repos you want:
cd Hound && vim config-example.json
- Rename the (now edited) config file:
mv config-example.json config.json
- Set your GOPATH:
export GOPATH=`pwd`
- Run the server:
go run src/hound/cmds/houndd/main.go
- See Hound in action in your browser at http://localhost:6080/
Have Rake installed? Steps 4 and 5 change to:
- Run rake to create binaries:
rake
- Run the binary:
./bin/houndd
This is the preferred approach, since the binaries are generally easier to work with, and rake will build both the server and the CLI binaries at the same time.
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
- Rake (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.
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!
Similarly, right now Hound only supports git repositories, although adding SVN and Mercurial wouldn't take too much work. Pull requests for this are welcome.
Hacking on Hound
Building
rake
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: