Intranet Stack Exchange

A tool to enable using the StackExchange datadumps in offline environments (e.g. internal network of a company, not connected to the internet).

Here are a few screenshots:

• http://www.mediafire.com/view/l9rdrmi6i7zz398/ISE_SingleSite.png
• http://www.mediafire.com/view/io5veplpn1k2q99/ISE_SearchResults.png
• http://www.mediafire.com/view/nv1vzy31ib3mrdi/ISE_QuestionAndAnswers.png

This application will enable organizations, whose network is isolated from the web, to enjoy the massive Q&A database StackExchange has publicly released, in various topics ranging from Programming to Movies to Math and much more.

Questions, ideas and bugs - please contact me: [email protected]

Prerequisites:

• Python 2.7
• A Linux server with admin privileges

Dependencies:

• Bottle

• Whoosh

• CherryPy

• Known issues: None.

Basic Usage:

• Clone (or Unzip) the git to some directory.

• install the required libraries: either run "pip install -r requirements.txt" for automatic install, or install the libraries (Whoosh, bootle, etc.) manually.

• Go to the /Sources directory

• Run:

  python Indexer.py
  

  The app will index all the datadumps in the /Datadumps folder.

• Run:

  python Webserver.py <optional: server's ip address> <optional: port number>
  

  The webserver will start.

  If no IP or Port number were given, the server will launch in 'development mode': localhost, 8080.

  Open the web browswer, and go to the server's ip address. e.g.: "http://192.1.2.3:80/" or "http://localhost:8080/" You will get a browesable version of the Stack Exchange sites.

Advanced Options:

1. The application comes with 3 sample databases: Ardunio, Astronomy and Beer. To add more databases, go to the Internet-Archive download page for data-dumps (https://archive.org/details/stackexchange), and download the databases you want. Unzip the downloaded databases into the /Datadumps folder, under a folder with the database's name.

For example:

 /Datadumps
    /Beer
    /Astronomy
    /Ardunio
    /Movies
        Posts.xml
        Comments.xml
        ...

2. It is possible to index only selected database(s), to save time. in /Sources, type: python Indexer.py debug

3. The website I used for the application is minimal and basic. You can modify it easily by changing the HTML, CSS, etc. in the /Sources/views and /Sources/static folders. Alternatively, you can design you're own website from scratch! The Webserver.py module calls functions in the Indexer.py & SearchEngine.py modules - so you can modify only the Webserver.py module for a whole new user experience.

Note: This work is partly inspired by Stackdump (https://bitbucket.org/samuel.lai/stackdump). Thanks, Samuel! :-)