backend/README.md

backend

Long-running HTTP server that owns the searcher processes (and therefore the loaded model weights). The UI and the CLI both talk to it — models are loaded once and reused.

Run

# from repo root, using the indexing venv
indexing/.env/bin/python backend/server.py            # default 127.0.0.1:8000
indexing/.env/bin/python backend/server.py --port 8042

Make sure the indexes exist first:

cd indexing && python index.py /path/to/folder

Routes

route	what
GET /	serves ui/static/index.html
GET /static/<file>	UI assets
GET /api/modalities	{modalities: [...], groups: {...}}
GET /api/search/<modality>?q=&k=	per-modality search → {modality, kind, query, hits:[{score,path}]}
GET /api/file?path=	serve an indexed file (with stale-path healing)

Clients fan out across /api/search/<modality> themselves — the UI does this with Promise.all so columns render as soon as their modality returns.

Path healing

The /api/file endpoint accepts the absolute path stored in indexing/index_data/*_meta.json. If that file has since been moved, the server falls back to a basename lookup against indexing/ and the repo root, so re-indexing isn't required just to view stale-path results.