Housaku (豊作)

Housaku is a powerful yet simple personal search engine built on top of SQLite's FTS5.

Features

• Support for multiple file formats: Index files in a variety of formats, including:
  • Plain text files.
  • Markdown.
  • PDF.
  • EPUB.
  • DOCX, XLSX and PPTX.
  • CSV.
• Basic Web Scraping: In addition to personal files, you can also index posts from your favorite RSS/Atom feeds.
• Parallel File Processing: Housaku utilizes multi-threading to process files simultaneously, making the indexing process incredibly fast.
• Powered by SQLite's FTS5: Built on the advanced full-text search capabilities of SQLite's FTS5 extension.
• Relevant Results with BM25: Search results are sorted using the BM25 algorithm, ensuring the most relevant results.
• Web UI: Search using your favorite web browser thanks to a friendly and modern Web UI.
• TUI: A simple but easy-to-use TUI made with Textual that enhances the command-line experience.

WIP

Housaku is in active development, and some aspects need further refinement before I can consider the project "stable." This includes the TUI, which requires some polishing, and the Web UI, which needs significant improvements.

Motivation

As someone who stores a wealth of documents on my hard drive—ranging from academic PDFs to personal notes in Obsidian—I often found it challenging to search across multiple applications and file types. I wanted a solution that would allow me to search not only my notes but also important books in my Calibre library and blog posts from my favorite feeds. This inspired me to build Housaku.

Install

Via pip

pip install housaku

Via pipx

pipx install housaku

Via uv

uv tool add housaku

# Or

uvx housaku

Usage

Configuration

To start using Housaku, the first step is to edit the config.toml file located at $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/housaku/config.toml. This file is generated the first time you run housaku and will look something like this:

# Welcome! This is the configuration file for housaku.

[files]
# Directories to include for indexing.
# Example: include = ["/home/<user>/documents/notes"]
include = []

# Patterns to exclude from the indexing
# Example: exclude = ["*.tmp", "backup", "*.png"]
exclude = []

[feeds]
# List of RSS/Atom feeds to index
# Example: urls = ["https://example.com/feed", "https://anotherexample.com/rss"]
urls = []

Notes: This folder will also contain the SQLite database where all the indexed data will be stored.

To open your config.toml file, you can just run the following command:

housaku config

Indexing

Once you have configured your directories and/or feeds, run the following command to start the indexing process.

housaku index

If you want to specify directories for indexing when running the index command, use the -i option. For example:

housaku index -i "/home/<user>/Documents/notes" -i "/home/<user>/Documents/vault/"

Search

To perform a search, you just need to use the following command:

housaku search --query "search engine"

# By default the limit is 20
housaku search --query "search engine" --limit 5

TUI

You can also search using the TUI. To start using it just run:

housaku tui

Web

To start the Web UI, simply run:

housaku web

# You can also specify the port
housaku web --port 8787 # by default is 4242

Contributing

Contributions are welcome! If you have suggestions for improvements or new features, feel free to open an issue.