_servers.html.md

Servers / Applications{#servers}

edit

Picky, from version 3.0 onwards, is designed to run anywhere, in anything. An octopus has eight legs, remember?

This means you can have a Picky server running in a DRb instance if you want to. Or in irb, for example.

We do run and test the Picky server in two styles, Classic and Sinatra.

But don't let that stop you from just using it in a class or just a script. This is a perfectly ok way to use Picky:

require 'picky'

include Picky # So we don't have to type Picky:: everywhere.

books_index = Index.new(:books) do
  source Sources::CSV.new(:title, :author, file: 'library.csv')
  category :title
  category :author
end

books_index.index
books_index.reload

books = Search.new books_index do
  boost [:title, :author] => +2
end

results = books.search "test"
results = books.search "alan turing"

require 'pp'
pp results.to_hash

More Ruby, more power to you!

Sinatra Style{#servers-sinatra}

A Sinatra server is usually just a single file. In Picky, it is a top-level file named

app.rb

We recommend to use the modular Sinatra style as opposed to the classic style. It's possible to write a Picky server in the classic style, but using the modular style offers more options.

require 'sinatra/base'
require 'picky'

class BookSearch < Sinatra::Application

  books_index = Index.new(:books) do
    source { Book.order("isbn ASC") }
    category :title
    category :author
  end

  books = Search.new books_index do
    boost [:title, :author] => +2
  end

  get '/books' do
    results = books.search params[:query],
                           params[:ids]    || 20,
                           params[:offset] ||  0
    results.to_json
  end

end

This is already a complete Sinatra server.

Routing{#servers-sinatra-routing}

The Sinatra Picky server uses the same routing as Sinatra (of course). More information on Sinatra routing.

If you use the server with the picky client software (provided with the picky-client gem), you should return JSON from the Sinatra get. Just call to_json on the returned results to get the results in JSON format.

get '/books' do
  results = books.search params[:query], params[:ids] || 20, params[:offset] ||  0
  results.to_json
end

The above example search can be called using for example curl:

curl 'localhost:8080/books?query=test'

Logging{#servers-sinatra-logging}

TODO Update this section.

This is one way to do it:

MyLogger = Logger.new "log/search.log"

# ...

get '/books' do
  results = books.search "test"
  MyLogger.info results
  results.to_json
end

or set it up in separate files for different environments:

require "logging/#{PICKY_ENVIRONMENT}"

Note that this is not Rack logging, but Picky search engine logging. The resulting file can be used with the picky-statistics gem.

All In One (Client + Server){#servers-allinone}

The All In One server is a Sinatra server and a Sinatra client rolled in one.

It's best to just generate one and look at it:

picky generate all_in_one all_in_one_test

and then follow the instructions.

When would you use an All In One server? One place is Heroku, since it is a bit more complicated to set up two servers that interact with each other.

It's nice for small convenient searches. For production setups we recommend to use a separate server to make everything separately cacheable etc.