φarsk!

An open source, interactive Proto-Indo-European search tool.

φarsk is built using Python, Twisted (for async networking), the simple web framework Klein (an implementation of Bottle for Twisted), Bootstrap, and MongoDB.

Project

Features

Current features include:

• TBD

Features currently underdevelopment can be viewed in the TODO file.

Dependencies

This project has the following dependencies:

• Node.js (for Bootstrap)
• MongoDB

These need to be installed before you can run the code in this project. See below for instructions.

Some of the utilities for building searchable content make use of the following additional libraries:

• stemming
• metaphone
• pdfminer
• BeautifulSoup

These will be installed for you when you run make install-deps (see below for more info).

The Name

The following names were considered for the project (taken from the first word list imported into the application, Proto-Celtic):

• bargo: "book"
• swiljāje: "search"
• φar-: "seek"
• φarsk-e/o-: "ask" and in the imperative, φarsk!

Installation

1. Download and install node.js for your system: http://nodejs.org/#download (this is only needed for Bootstrap)
2. Download and install MongoDB for your system: http://www.mongodb.org/downloads. For most, copying the contents of the downloaded folder's bin/* sub-directory to /usr/local/bin will suffice.
3. From a terminal, check out the φarsk code: git clone https://github.com/oubiwann/tharsk.git
4. Enter the φarsk dir and install the app: cd tharsk && make install-deps

If you would like to re-create the database from sources, you can do that with the command given below. However, beware:

This will DELETE ALL YOUR DATA! All φarsk data will be dropped and recreated!

You've been warned. Here's how you do it: make init-db

Running the Server

For development, you'll need to start up the MongoDB server:

$ make start-mongo

And then you can fire up the front-end:

$ make run-dev

For production, you can use these:

1. In the φarsk dir, run the tharsk server: make start-prod
2. When you're done, shut it down: make stop-prod

Using the Command Line Tool

In order to effectively use the tharsk command-line Twisted plugin, you will need to set your Python encoding to UTF-8. Here's how:

$ export PYTHONIOENCODING=utf-8

If you do not set this variable, you will see numerous encoding/decoding errors when you try to execute scripts that display UTF-8 output to the terminal.

The same tool that you run tharsk from is used to parse and execute commands from a system shell. For instance:

$ twistd tharsk dictionaries

This will list the supported dictionaries.

To find out what the list of supported tharsk subcommands are, simply use the --help parameter:

$ twistd tharsk --help

Some subcommands will have additional options, and those are also available via the help parameter:

$ twistd tharsk word-list --help