Noogle

Noogle is a Nix API search engine. It allows you to search functions based on their types and other attributes in nix projects. In nixpkgs especially the builtins and lib attributes.

• Beginners-friendly search for nix and nix-related functions
• Expert search with directly typing type signatures
• Search functions based on:
  • type
  • signature
  • name
• tree-search from one type to another

How it works

Indexers:

Data collections need to be up-to-date Those collections are then combined and dumped somewhere (db / json)

For the indexing i currently use:

• Nixdoc (a fork) to collect nixpkgs.lib informations
• nix __dump-builtins + builtins-types.json for the nix builtins

As some parts of nix already have nixos modules their input/output can be discovered. I still lack some tool to integrate that into noogle.

Search:

• haskell-like types are parsed and splitted between input and ouput
• text search, looks in all metadata fields for an exact matching word or character sequence. I dont have elastic search yet.

View the prototype here

We need your help / what is missing

• Parsing Types: into a real type signature tree
• Upstream missing type informations (like in /lib/attrsets.nix)
• Write type signatures for the builtins in json
• Add path, where each function can be imported from. e.g. lib.makeOverridable or lib.customisation.makeOverridable (it is available in both sets)
• Website
  • improve share / social interactions
  • Add filter by tags e.g. lib.lists
  • Prepare for scaling up: Either use api or use indexedDB with WebAssembly for complete offline usage?
  • Mobile optimization for reading on the go
• Clean up / enhance my nixdoc fork.
  • Make the sloppy parser more error resistant
  • Some valueable information can be used from the rnix AST ?

Contribute

Contributions are very welcome just file a PR or issue

Build this page

nix build .#

Develop

nix develop

This command creates the node_modules folder with all needed dependencies based on dream2nix.