The search widget for the IF Archive

• Copyright 2025 by the Interactive Fiction Technology Foundation
• Distributed under the MIT license
• Created by Andrew Plotkin [email protected]

This is the web plugin that provides IF Archive search.

The service is built on Python, server-side WSGI, and the Whoosh query library. At present there is no Javascript at all.

The basic deal

The search index is built directly from the Master-Index.xml file, which is generated on the Archive by the ifmap tool. Master-Index.xml contains all the text descriptions of the files, as well as the rest of the metadata. So there is no need to scan the HTML files on disk.

We include a few metadata fields (size, date, tuid) in the searchable index. Note that this is not all of them. (You can't search on md5 for example.)

Contents

• search.wsgi: A Python script that handles the main web interface. This lives in /var/ifarchive/wsgi-bin.
• searchlib: App-specific support for admin.wsgi. Lives in /var/ifarchive/wsgi-bin.
• templates: HTML templates for the search page. Lives in /var/ifarchive/lib/searchtpl.
• sample.config: Config file. Lives in /var/ifarchive/lib/ifarch.config. Note that the version in this repository is an incomplete sample. The real ifarch.config has settings for other tools (upload, ifmap, admintool).

This also relies on:

• tinyapp: A general web-app framework for WSGI apps. This is part of the admintool repo.
• css/ifarchive.css: Archive stylesheet, which includes the search page styles. Part of the ifarchive-static repo.

Command-line use

python3 /var/ifarchive/wsgi-bin/search.wsgi

This will display a list of command-line commands. These include:

search.wsgi build [ --create ]

Rebuild the search index from Master-Index.xml. Run this as root. The search app should detect the update and provide the updated search info immediately.

The --create option wipes the search index completely (if present) and recreates it from scratch. You should only need to do this once. After using this option, restart httpd.

search.wsgi search [ --page PAGE ] [ --limit LIMIT ] QUERY

Perform a search on the command line. (Does not have to be run as root.)

Normally returns a maximum of 10 results per page; you can increase this with --limit. If there are more results, use --page 2 and so on.

Testing

It is possible to test the admin interface on a local Apache server. See the TESTING.md file in the admintool repo. (Except this repo is not yet set up for Docker.)