meteor-fuzzy

meteor-fuzzy

A tool that reads and monitor data from Meteor's MongoDB database and turns them into searchable data using fuzzy searching.

Motivations

• Go memory usage is very appealing in most situations. Especially for my current usecase, other solutions like Elastic Search is just a bit overkill.
• Go is a compiled language, and generates a static binary that can run on any platform of the same architecture/system. One needs to compile the tool once and just copy it everywhere it is needed without worrying if it will work or not.
• The library http://github.com/renstrom/fuzzysearch/fuzzy is exactly what I needed for my current usecase.

Installation

This tool uses ZeroMQ (ZMQ) version 4, which is not present on Ubuntu (don't know what the reason behind thins). Thus, if you are on Ubuntu, even the latest one at the time of writing this README is still version 2, and you will need to manually install the libzmq version 4 manually.

ZMQ Library for your System

This section is for installing the library itself, the core of ZMQ to be widely available for your system. It is recommended to use container such as Docker so that you don't pollute your system; I mean, if you think it could conflict with the system package.

cd tmp/
wget 'http://download.zeromq.org/zeromq-4.1.4.tar.gz'
tar xf zeromq-4.1.4.tar.gz
cd zeromq-*
./configure --without-documentation --without-libsodium
make -j8
sudo make install
sudo ldconfig

ZMQ Support for your Meteor app

Obviously, you need to be able to communicate with this tool in your Meteor app as well. This is done via the wonderful meteorhacks:npm Meteor package.

cd meteor-app-directory/
meteor add meteorhacks:npm

You need to restart your Meteor app after the installation. Then, look into the root of your Meteor app, there will be a new file called packages.json, open and update it to contain this:

{
  "zmq": "2.14.0"
}

At the time or writing this README, that is the most recent version of zmq package for NPM. And yes, it is a NPM package; meteorhacks:npm is meant to allow you to use NPM packages from within Meteor.

Compilation

Since this is a Golang project, you need to compile it. One should be able to create the binary like:

mkdir $HOME/go
export GOPATH=$HOME/go
go get install github.com/eliezedeck/meteor-fuzzy

Now, in the directory $HOME/go/bin you will find a static binary file named meteor-fuzzy. That is your main binary, you can run in anywhere as long as the target platform is the same as yours.

Usage

First, get documented on how to use ZeroMQ/ZMQ. Send your query request to the meteor-fuzzy as a JSON string with the following format:

{
  "query": "your query here",
  "limit": 5
}

You will then receive a maximum amount of 5 (or any number you set). The format is:

{
  "result": [
    "id1",
    "id2",
    "..."
  ]
}

Each of these are the ID of the items matched on the actual MongoDB database.

In case of error, it will be:

{
  "error": "Error message will go here"
}

Implementation

meteor-fuzzy makes use of the library http://github.com/renstrom/fuzzysearch/fuzzy for the actual fuzzy searching algorithm. I had it forked to implement some of my requirements.

With that said, this project's is just to connect the dots. That is, inter-connect Meteor's MongoDB and the actual algorithm that does the actual searching.

The Interconnection part is done thru the help of ZMQ library.

LICENSE

MIT