Getting Started

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Installation

Add Exograph to your deps:

def deps do
  [
    {:exograph, "~> 0.7"}
  ]
end

Postgres is required. ParadeDB's pg_search extension is optional — without it, text search falls back to pg_trgm ILIKE, which is fast but not BM25-ranked.

Install pg_trgm if it is not already enabled:

CREATE EXTENSION IF NOT EXISTS pg_trgm;

Index your project

Point Exograph at your source directories with --migrate to create the tables:

mix exograph.index --repo MyApp.Repo --migrate lib

To also index tests and set a custom prefix:

mix exograph.index --repo MyApp.Repo --migrate --prefix exograph lib test

From Elixir:

{:ok, index} =
  Exograph.index("lib",
    repo: MyApp.Repo,
    prefix: "exograph",
    migrate?: true
  )

migrate?: true runs Exograph's Ecto migrations under the configured prefix. Re-running is safe; migrations are idempotent.

Search from CLI

Structural search — finds fragments matching an ExAST pattern:

mix exograph.search 'Repo.get!(_, _)' --repo MyApp.Repo --migrate lib

Text search:

mix exograph.search 'TODO' --text --repo MyApp.Repo --migrate lib

Regex search:

mix exograph.search 'Repo\.get!\(' --regex --repo MyApp.Repo --migrate lib

Structural search with predicates:

mix exograph.search 'def _ do ... end' \
  --repo MyApp.Repo --migrate lib \
  --contains 'Repo.transaction(_)' \
  --not-contains 'IO.inspect(_)'

Start the web UI

mix exograph.web --prefix exograph --port 4200

Open http://localhost:4200. The editor supports structural, text, and regex modes. Pass --database-url or set EXOGRAPH_DATABASE_URL when not using an application repo:

EXOGRAPH_DATABASE_URL=postgres://localhost/mydb \
  mix exograph.web --prefix exograph --port 4200

Index Hex.pm packages

Download and index packages straight from Hex.pm:

mix exograph.index.hex --mode top --limit 1000 --concurrency 8

This streams: download tarball → extract to tmpdir → index → cleanup. Peak disk usage is proportional to concurrency, not total package count. Already-indexed packages are skipped automatically.

Watch progress live by adding --web:

mix exograph.index.hex --mode latest --concurrency 8 --web --port 4200

The dashboard at http://localhost:4200/progress shows per-package status, rate, and ETA.

Modes:

  • latest — most recent version of each package (default)
  • top --limit N — top N most-downloaded packages
  • all — every published version

See Package Indexing for scale numbers and full options.

Next steps