itchgrep.com

Discover the Perfect Assets for Your Games

🔍 search through itch.io assets using text queries; find what you need without relying solely on tags.

🌐 Visit itchgrep.com to start exploring.

🤝 Join Our Community

We have a 🎮 Discord server! It's a place for sharing, learning, and talking about game development and the projects we're passionate about. Feel free to join us!

💖 Support itchgrep

Your support fuels our passion and helps keep the servers running! If you appreciate what we do and want to contribute to our journey, consider:

• 🍵 Buying me a coffee! Your generosity is immensely appreciated, and every cup allows me to keep working on cool stuff.

🛠 Techstack

• Go
• Templ
• Bleve
• HTMX
• Google Cloud
• Docker

These tools and technologies were chosen with care to provide a seamless and efficient experience for both developers and users of itchgrep.

🗼 Architecture

Running Locally

If you want to contribute, or just run the project locally for your own use, follow the instructions below.

This project is built and maintained on Linux. While I don't think it's generally impossible to run on Windows, but the Taskfile is written using Linux commands.

Tooling Dependencies

• Golang
• Task
• Docker
• gcloud

Running

The project is split up into two services:

• The dataservice, responsible for fetching the list of assets from itch.io
• The webserver, presenting the stored data with search tools.

Use the included Taskfile to run these services.

• task local-dataservice will launch the dataservice with a local instance of GCS. Send a GET request to its trigger endpoint: curl -X GET "localhost:8080/trigger-fetch". This will cause the service to scrape the data from itch.io, index it and store both data and index on the local GCS.

• !! The way of running described above is currently not working properly, I am looking for assistance on this. Please see Issue #1. In the meantime use task local-dataservice-temp-fix. This runs the dataservice without docker.
• task local-webserver will build and run the web server in a Docker container together with the local GCS in a separate container. Templ templates are not copied during the build, but generated inside the container.
• task templ will generate .go files from any .templ files. This is not required for building/running, but to provide code completion and stop the language server from complaining.

Deploying in the Cloud

The project was created with the intention of hosting both dataservice and webserver on Google Cloud Run. The asset data is intended to be stored in Google Cloud Store.

Google Cloud Run can be replaced with any serverless platform, and Google Cloud Store can be replaced with any object store, but some work will be required if this is your goal, and the following instructions will assume Google Cloud services.

To deploy the project on Google Cloud, follow the steps below.

Setting up gcloud

A couple of preparation steps:

• Make sure, you have set up a project in your Google Cloud Console.
• In your project, create an object store with the name itchgrep-data. (You can also use another name here, but you must then change the const in the file internal/storage/storage.go accordingly)
• In your project, create a new service account, and give it the role of Cloud Run Invoker. Later, we will attach this service account to a scheduler job, to regularly trigger a run of the dataservice.
• Make sure you have installed the gcloud CLI.
• You may use task gcloud-setup to configure gcloud for use with this project. Otherwise, make sure to properly configure manually.
• Adjust all instances of the variables PROJECT_ID, REGION and LOCATION found in the Taskfile to fit your Google Cloud project configuration.

Deploying the dataservice and setting up a Scheduler Job

• Run task deploy-dataservice to build and deploy the dataservice. At the end you will receive a service URL for the newly deployed dataservice.
• Now, to create a scheduler job, run the following command. Notice how we are passing security critical information as environment variables:

  DATASERVICE_URL=https://dataservice-ly6n5ozylq-od.a.run.app \
  SERVICE_ACCOUNT_EMAIL=cloud-run-invoker@itchgrep.iam.gserviceaccount.com \
  go-task create-dataservice-scheduler-job

• At this point, you should manually force a run of the dataservice-job in the cloud scheduler console. This will ensure that the object store is populated with data, before we start the webserver for the first time. You should wait around 5 minutes after doing that, before deploying the webserver, so the dataservice has time to fetch and store new data.

Deploying the webserver

Run task deploy-webserver. No further work should be required.

Testing

Tests can be run by using the included Taskfile.

• task test: Runs all of the test tasks below.
• task test-storage: Tests the storage package, requires Docker to be running.

Contributing

• before posting a pull request, please use go fmt to format your code.
• beginners to open source are welcome. if you'd like to contribute, but don't understand something, you're welcome to ask using an issue.
• please post feature requests as one issue per feature.
• before working on a larger contribution, please open an issue to ask if the feature you want to implement would be welcome.
• to maintain a transparent workflow, please keep all discourse regarding work on this repository in the github issues, don't message me through other channels to discuss this.