This was my first project made for fun. Do NOT use it in production. Never hardcode API keys, use safe storage such as environment variables.

LightInTheDark is a custom search engine that uses the Google Cloud JSON API and the Python Flask module to handle the search results, the web server and the URL routes. Live Demo

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Installation

Tested on Python 3.10, 3.12

First of all, clone the repository, you must have Git installed, once you install it on your system, open the terminal and type:

git clone https://github.com/AndrewChalikias/lightinthedark.git

It is highly recommended to create a Python virtual environment in order to containerize the modules and avoid future conflicts. To do that, cd ~lightinthedark/ to navigate to the repo directory and follow the below commands.

Linux:

• python3 -m venv venv
• source venv/bin/activate From now on, everything you install through pip will be only available on this folder.

Use requirements.txt

This file includes all the required modules to make the project work. You only have to type pip install -r "requirements.txt" on the terminal and it will automatically install them.

Change the default values

Before you run it, you have to change some default values with your own. The first and most important is the key.conf file located in the project root, replace the first line with your personal Google Cloud Custom Search API Key.

Next, go to the line 9 of the api.py file and change the value of the "cx" dictionary key, replace it with your Programmable Search Engine ID, you can find it on the overview section.

Run the project

Type python3 main.py it will start a localhost server, the default port is 5000 but you can change it by passing port=portnumber as a parameter inside the app.run() on the last line.