Installing and Using OpenGrok on Mac OS X

Background

In previous couple of posts we saw how we can setup git repositories, install git client and maintain your codebase. 

• Pushing existing local project to Github
• Installing Git in Ubuntu
• Install and use Git on Windows
• Installing Git on CentOS from sources

In this post we will see how to set up opengrok. This is a code base search tool that you can use to index and search your huge complex codebase. I am going to show this on my mac laptop. If you want to setup a proper server please refer to official documentation.

Installing and Using OpenGrok on Mac OS X

I am going to use Homebrew to do most of the setup here. If you are not aware of homebrew then you can read -

• Tips and Tricks for your MacBook

 Couple of things you need to install before are -

• A servlet container like GlassFish or Tomcat to run and deploy your grok server. I will use tomcat.
• Exuberant Ctags for analysis.

You can run following commands to set these up -

• brew update
• brew install tomcat
• brew install ctags 

You can just type catalina to see tomcat is properly installed -

Next set environment variable as follows -

• export OPENGROK_TOMCAT_BASE=/usr/local/Cellar/tomcat/8.5.20/libexec

 For path you can refer to catalina screenshot above. This environment variable will basically tell where grok needs to be deployed.

Download the latest opengrok binary from-

• https://github.com/OpenGrok/OpenGrok/releases 

 I am using opengrok-1.1-rc13.tar.gz.

Next go yo your opengrok bin directory. In my case it is -

• /Users/athakur/Documents/Softwares/opengrok-1.1-rc13/bin

and run -

• ./OpenGrok deploy

 This will deploy grok code on your tomcat container. Now start the tomcat container

 You can now access it via -

• http://localhost:8080/source/

 The error you see is ok since we have not provided our codebase source directory yet.

Noe lets add source directory. My code is in-

•  ~/Documents/git/DataStructures

NOTE : DataStructures is a local copy of my github repo -

• https://github.com/aniket91/DataStructures/

I am going to maintain all codebase references in

• ~/local_repos/src/

So create a directory and add soft links as below -

 Now it's time to define your code directory that opengrok can understand. So define another environment variable -

• export OPENGROK_INSTANCE_BASE=/Users/athakur/local_repos

That's now lets index this content. To index it go to you opengrok bin directory and run -

• ./OpenGrok index.

You can see it automatically creates directory it needs. Just make sure it has appropriate permissions -

That's it you can refresh grok page and start searching code.

 NOTE : For every update to your actual repository or for any new repository getting added you need to call ./Opengrok index to index it. You can probably write a cron job that does an automatic pull of your repository and runs index on it.

Related Links

• Pushing existing local project to Github
• Installing Git in Ubuntu
• Install and use Git on Windows
• Installing Git on CentOS from sources
• How to install OpenGrok (official documentation)