Roo - A smart bookmarking search engine for your browser

Introduction

Roo (short for "Kangaroo") is a smart bookmarking and productivity CLI tool that works as a custom search engine for your browser, allowing you to quickly issue commands in your browser's search bar. It's a simple server that accepts a search query and redirects to the appropriate URI based on a set of predefined (and customizable) rules.

Roo is useful for personal productivity, but many users run it on company servers to allow all employees to share a common way to quickly access internal and external tools, wikis, documentation and resources.

Roo is heavily inspired by bunny1, a bookmarking tool created at Facebook and open-sourced in 2012. It's written in Rust and released under the MIT license.

Built-in commands

Roo comes with a set of default commands that can be fully customized.

Installation

Install from Crates.io

If you are a Rust programmer you can install roo_engine with cargo

cargo install roo_engine

Install with Homebrew (Mac)

brew tap marcocampana/tap
brew install roo_engine

Check out the repository

If you are on MacOs, installing with homebrew is the recommended choice. However, you can also check out the repository on your machine and run with cargo.

1. Install Rust and Cargo

2. Check out the repository from GitHub

   git checkout git@github.com:marcocampana/roo_engine.git
   

3. Run with Cargo

   cargo run
   

How to

Start the server

If you installed the binary, you can start the server by executing the roo_engine binary in your terminal:

roo_engine

or if you using cargo you can run:

cargo run

This will start roo_engine on 127.0.0.1:3030.

You can use the --help argument to print all the available arguments you can use to run roo.

roo --help

Add roo_engine as your default search engine in Chrome

1. Go to chrome://settings/searchEngines
2. Click on Add under Search engines and use this URL http://127.0.0.1:3030/?q=%s
3. Optionally set this as your default search engine for maximum productivity™

Define your own commands

roo_engine takes your search query and tries to match it against the list of defined commands. Buil-in commands that ship with roo_engine are found in the parser.rs file. You can make your own rules file and tell roo where to find it at startup:

roo --path ~/my_file.toml

A roo_engine command looks like this:

[[command]]
 input = "g (.+)"
 output = "https://www.google.com/search?q={}"

the input string is a regex that is matched against the input of your browser's search bar. If a match is found the regex group captured in () is replaced in the {} found on the output string where the browser redirects. In the example above we are defining a command g that will match a string g <search query> that redirects to Google search to search for <search query>.

See rules.toml for sample commands.

Example: JIRA tasks

If you are a JIRA user you know that JIRA task ids have the format <PROJECT_PREFIX>-<TASK_NUMBER>. You could write a custom command that allows you to input the task id in your browser search bar and be redirected to the task details. For example, let's assume that your project prefix is MP you could define the following rule:

[[command]]
 input = "(MP-.+)"
 output = "https://marcocampana.atlassian.net/browse/{}"

Run in the background

On MacOs you can setup launchd to automatically run roo_engine in the background.

1. create a plist file in the ~/Library/LaunchAgents folder (make sure to specify the absolute path to the code in your machine instead of/Users/myuser)

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
 <dict>
  <key>Label</key>
  <string>com.marcocampana.roo_engine</string>
  <key>RunAtLoad</key>
  <true/>
  
  <key>WorkingDirectory</key>
  <string>/User/myuser/code/roo_engine</string>

  <key>ProgramArguments</key>
     <array>
        <string><PATH_TO>/User/myuser/.cargo/bin/cargo</string>
        <string>run</string>
     </array>
 </dict>
</plist>

2. Load the configuration to start the server:

launchctl load ~/Library/LaunchAgents/com.marcocampana.roo_engine.plist

How to contribute

Fork this repo and send a pull request. Make sure to have unit tests for any new functionality

Run tests with:

cargo test