Slice is a super-fast, lightweight, scalable, and easy-to-setup, source code search engine for use by individuals or small teams. It is designed and optimized for use on low-end commodity hardware: it will return lightning fast results on large source code bases without requiring a large amount of RAM or an SSD.

Of course, it will also return lightning fast results on better equipped machines with more RAM+SSD, but returning fast results on fast machines is too easy 😄.

Additionally, unlike traditional source code engines like Github source search, Slice is optimized for substring text search. This means a search for RestService will not only match RestService.java, but also MyRestService.java and MockRestServiceTest.java. Source code search engines like Github are traditionaly only optimized for 'exact match' or 'starts with' searches (as efficient tree-based algorithms exist for these).

Slice is a backronym that stands for Searchable scaLable Index Creation Engine.

Getting Started

1. Clone the repo, build it, and extract the newly built Open Liberty server:

git clone https://github.com/jgwest/slice
cd slice
mvn clean package
cd SliceEAR/target

2. Extract the server to install it

   • Extract the file SliceEAR-1.0.0-SNAPSHOT.zip to somewhere on your machine, which we will refer to as the installation directory (install dir).

3. Add configuration settings to the Open Liberty configuration file, server.xml:

   • Open the Liberty server.xml file at (install dir)/wlp/usr/servers/defaultServer/server.xml
   • If you want Open Liberty to be accessible from other machines, you must use host="*". Add that attribute to the following line in server.xml (you may also edit http/https port): <httpEndpoint httpPort="9080" httpsPort="9443" id="defaultHttpEndpoint" host="*">
   • Add the following to the server.xml:

	<jndiEntry jndiName="slice/config_xml_path" value="(path to GettingStarted-FileConfiguration.xml in artifacts/ directory of git repo)"/>
	<jndiEntry jndiName="slice/SRC_DIR" value="(path to root of git repo)"/>
	<jndiEntry jndiName="slice/DB_DIR" value="(path to where you want to store the database)"/>

4. Run the indexer to index the source code in SRC_DIR, and store the index in DB_DIR

export DB_DIR=(path to where you want to store the database)
export SRC_DIR=(path to root of git repo)
# With Windows, use set, rather than export

java -jar (git repo root)/SliceCreation/target/SliceCreation-1.0.0-SNAPSHOT.jar (path to GettingStarted-FileConfiguration.xml in artifacts/ directory of git repo)

5. Start the Open Liberty server

(install dir)/wlp/bin/server start

• Or, to start the server as a foreground process (allowing you to see the console and server log), use:

(install dir)/wlp/bin/server run

6. Visit the Slice application at https://(your host name):9443/SliceRS/resources/test-src. Before you can issue search requests, you must log-in. Click Click here to log-in here. The username is test-user, the password is test-password. Both of these values are specified in the GettingStarted-FileConfiguration.xml file.

Screenshots

Search for code using a flexible set of query filters:

See search results in pretty-printed source code files: