fts (full-text search)

Full-text search demo powered by PostgreSQL, inspired by this article.

Overview

There are three components in this project: the dataset loader and both full-text search applications: a console app and a GUI app, described below.

The idea behind this demo project is to showcase the full-text search feature offered by PostgreSQL, as well as another example of a native multi-platform desktop GUI application written in Haskell.

It also showcases the power of functional effectful streams on the Scala side.

Overall, it was just a fun pet project 🤓

System requirements

Before anything else, we need a PostgreSQL instance up and running. You can use the supplied docker-compose.yml file, or have your own instance running.

If you care about reproducibility, then Nix is your best friend. If not, you can try and build the project via cabal new-build, good luck with that 😉

$ cachix use fts
$ nix-build
...
$ ls result/bin/
fts fts-ui

The first command is optional but recommended, if you don't want to compile the world! Once the build is complete, you'll find two executables corresponding the two applications described below.

Full-text search console app

In the console app, you can search movies by title (hit Ctrl + C to exit).

NOTE: Your terminal needs to support the rendering of emojis and Unicode characters. Make sure you have a modern font installed in your system. In my case, I use Alacritty and JetBrainsMono.

Full-text search GUI app

The GUI application is richer in features, powered by the monomer package, and adapted from the books example.

In addition to searching movies in Postgres, it tries to fetch the movie poster from TMDB, if the TMDB_API_KEY environment variable is set. To get one, have a look at the instructions.

NOTE: Non-NixOS users need to run fts-ui via nixGL, due to some complicated OpenGL linking issues. TL;DR:

$ nix-channel --add https://github.com/guibou/nixGL/archive/main.tar.gz nixgl
$ nix-channel --update
$ nix-env -iA nixgl.auto.nixGLDefault

Then run the program as nixGL result/bin/fts-ui instead.

Dataset loader

The loader is a nix shell script interpreted by Ammonite, written in Scala, which reads a movies CSV file, parses its content, and it stores them in Postgres. These tasks are made easy by fs2, fs2-data, and skunk.

$ cd data
$ ./Loader.sc

If you wish to change the Postgres connection details, have a look at the configuration file.

Technical details

Every time a title is entered, a full-text search is performed against Postgres via the following query, which orders the results by the corresponding ranking (ts_rank).

SELECT title_id, title, genre, year, language, description, actors
FROM movies
WHERE ts @@ to_tsquery('english', ?)
ORDER BY ts_rank(ts, to_tsquery('english', ?)) DESC

The console application only displays the title together with a link to the movie in imdb but anything should be possible with a bit of customization, as done in the GUI application.

Dataset License

The movies dataset is licensed under CC0 1.0, downloaded from here.