Getting Started

Introduction

SearchNEU is a longstanding project; one of the oldest ones in Sandbox. As a developer, if you're reading this, I'm sure you have some semblance of an idea of what SearchNEU is about: helping students find classes a lot more easily than banner does. Hopefully, this documentation will serve as your guide for navigating Search, making a it a little bit easier to keep this awesome project in tip-top shape!

Getting Started

Tech Installation

1. Install the pnpm package manager. This should be installed directly and not installed through npm. Run pnpm -v to ensure it was successfully installed (should return version information).
2. Install Docker following the directions on the site. Correct installation can be checked by running docker -v which should return version information.
3. Install Nodejs. Installation can vary by system, preferrences, and previous installations. The easiest way is to run pnpm env use --global 24 which uses pnpm to install Node. Note that pnpm may error and require pnpm setup to be run first. Node installation can be checked with node -v which should return a version starting with v24 (the current major Nodejs version that Search uses)
4. Install Turborepo globally with pnpm install turbo --global.
5. Clone the SearchNEU github repository with git clone git@github.com:sandboxnu/searchneu.git
6. Install all project dependencies! From inside the project directory, run pnpm install. This should install a bunch of packages and create some node_module directories.
7. Clone cache files from SearchNEU Cache Repository. These should be somewhere on your machine, but not in the main SearchNEU directory.

Running the Project

1. Start up the database with docker compose up -d.
2. After the first time you spin up the database, run turbo db:migrate to clear the database. More database information can be found here
3. Run turbo db:push to upload the drizzle schema
4. Seed the database with turbo scrape:up -- --cachePath="<PATH_TO_CATALOG_CACHES>" --terms=all
5. Run turbo dev to spin up SearchNEU and all packages
6. Visit http://localhost:3000 to view the site!

Specific Topics

Below you can dig into more intricate, specific parts of search. Go crazy! (We did)