Watch Me Work: A Chrome Extension for Real-time Automatic Searching
To install the Chrome extension, open Chrome and go to chrome://extensions. Enable Developer Mode in the top right corner and then click 'Load extension' and browse to the ui/extension_bundle folder in this repository.
The server needs to be running in order for the browser extension to work. There are two ways to set up the server application. The first and simplest is to go to the releases page and download the appropriate exectuable for your operating system. Then you can just run that file. Note that in order to run it, you may need to set the executable bit by doing chmod +x <file> where <file> is the filename of the executable you downloaded.
The second way is to install from the source code. This assumes you already have Python installed. Make sure you are using Python 3.6 or higher and your current directory is set to the root of this repository. Do pip install -r requirements.txt to install dependencies. Then run python init.py to download and setup data (if you prefer manually doing this for some reason, see 'Manual download of data' below').
To start the server, run:
python3 run_server.py
Instead of using init.py you may download data manually. Download https://northwestern.box.com/shared/static/iu3hhk9msqng57ac93vlf7ns2acqi8h1.zip and extract it in the search/ directory. If done successfully, you should now have a middata/ folder inside the search/ directory. You'll also need the "wordnet" package installed for NLTK, which can be done by running python3 -c 'import nltk; nltk.download("wordnet");.
By default, the extension only searches Wikipedia articles. To use Bing as the backend for search, start the server with the --finder_type bing option. You will also need to export the BING_KEY environment variable with the Bing API key. This key is listed in the WatchMeWork Slack (if you aren't part of the watch me work team, you can obtain a free trial key on the Bing API website.
To build a standalone executable that runs the server, you can use pyinstaller. Install with pip install pyinstaller and then do pyinstaller --onefile run_server.spec to build the executable (which will be in the dist/ folder when pyinstaller finishes).