rga: ripgrep, but also search in PDFs, E-Books, Office documents, zip, tar.gz, etc.

rga is a line-oriented search tool that allows you to look for a regex in a multitude of file types. rga wraps the awesome ripgrep and enables it to search in pdf, docx, sqlite, jpg, movie subtitles (mkv, mp4), etc.

For more detail, see this introductory blogpost: https://phiresky.github.io/blog/2019/rga--ripgrep-for-zip-targz-docx-odt-epub-jpg/

rga will recursively descend into archives and match text in every file type it knows.

Here is an example directory with different file types:

demo/
├── greeting.mkv
├── hello.odt
├── hello.sqlite3
└── somearchive.zip
├── dir
│ ├── greeting.docx
│ └── inner.tar.gz
│ └── greeting.pdf
└── greeting.epub

Integration with fzf

See the wiki for instructions of integrating rga with fzf.

INSTALLATION

Linux x64, macOS and Windows binaries are available in GitHub Releases.

Linux

Arch Linux

pacman -S ripgrep-all

Nix

nix-env -iA nixpkgs.ripgrep-all

Debian-based

download the rga binary and get the dependencies like this:

apt install ripgrep pandoc poppler-utils ffmpeg

If ripgrep is not included in your package sources, get it from here.

rga will search for all binaries it calls in $PATH and the directory itself is in.

Windows

Note that installing via chocolatey or scoop is the only supported download method. If you download the binary from releases manually, you will not get the dependencies (for example pdftotext from poppler).

If you get an error like VCRUNTIME140.DLL could not be found, you need to install vc_redist.x64.exe.

Chocolatey

choco install ripgrep-all

Scoop

scoop install rga

Homebrew/Linuxbrew

rga can be installed with Homebrew:

brew install rga

To install the dependencies that are each not strictly necessary but very useful:

brew install pandoc poppler ffmpeg

MacPorts

rga can also be installed on macOS via MacPorts:

sudo port install ripgrep-all

Compile from source

rga should compile with stable Rust (v1.75.0+, check with rustc --version). To build it, run the following (or the equivalent in your OS):

~$ apt install build-essential pandoc poppler-utils ffmpeg ripgrep cargo
~$ cargo install --locked ripgrep_all
~$ rga --version    # this should work now

Available Adapters

rga works with adapters that adapt various file formats. It comes with a few adapters integrated:

rga --rga-list-adapters

You can also add custom adapters. See the wiki for more information.

Adapters:

• pandoc Uses pandoc to convert binary/unreadable text documents to plain markdown-like text Runs: pandoc --from= --to=plain --wrap=none --markdown-headings=atx
  Extensions: .epub, .odt, .docx, .fb2, .ipynb, .html, .htm

• poppler Uses pdftotext (from poppler-utils) to extract plain text from PDF files Runs: pdftotext - -
  Extensions: .pdf
  Mime Types: application/pdf

• postprocpagebreaks Adds the page number to each line for an input file that specifies page breaks as ascii page break character. Mainly to be used internally by the poppler adapter.
  Extensions: .asciipagebreaks

• ffmpeg Uses ffmpeg to extract video metadata/chapters, subtitles, lyrics, and other metadata
  Extensions: .mkv, .mp4, .avi, .mp3, .ogg, .flac, .webm

• zip Reads a zip file as a stream and recurses down into its contents
  Extensions: .zip, .jar
  Mime Types: application/zip

• decompress Reads compressed file as a stream and runs a different extractor on the contents.
  Extensions: .als, .bz2, .gz, .tbz, .tbz2, .tgz, .xz, .zst
  Mime Types: application/gzip, application/x-bzip, application/x-xz, application/zstd

• tar Reads a tar file as a stream and recurses down into its contents
  Extensions: .tar

• sqlite Uses sqlite bindings to convert sqlite databases into a simple plain text format
  Extensions: .db, .db3, .sqlite, .sqlite3
  Mime Types: application/x-sqlite3

The following adapters are disabled by default, and can be enabled using '--rga-adapters=+foo,bar':

• mail Reads mailbox/mail files and runs extractors on the contents and attachments.
  Extensions: .mbox, .mbx, .eml
  Mime Types: application/mbox, message/rfc822

USAGE:

rga [RGA OPTIONS] [RG OPTIONS] PATTERN [PATH ...]

FLAGS:

--rga-accurate

Use more accurate but slower matching by mime type

By default, rga will match files using file extensions. Some programs, such as sqlite3, don't care about the file extension at all, so users sometimes use any or no extension at all. With this flag, rga will try to detect the mime type of input files using the magic bytes (similar to the `file` utility), and use that to choose the adapter. Detection is only done on the first 8KiB of the file, since we can't always seek on the input (in archives).

--rga-no-cache

Disable caching of results

By default, rga caches the extracted text, if it is small enough, to a database in ${XDG_CACHE_DIR-~/.cache}/ripgrep-all on Linux, ~/Library/Caches/ripgrep-all on macOS, or C:\Users\username\AppData\Local\ripgrep-all on Windows. This way, repeated searches on the same set of files will be much faster. If you pass this flag, all caching will be disabled.

-h, --help

Prints help information

--rga-list-adapters

List all known adapters

--rga-print-config-schema

Print the JSON Schema of the configuration file

--rg-help

Show help for ripgrep itself

--rg-version

Show version of ripgrep itself

-V, --version

Prints version information

OPTIONS:

--rga-adapters=<adapters>...

Change which adapters to use and in which priority order (descending)

"foo,bar" means use only adapters foo and bar. "-bar,baz" means use all default adapters except for bar and baz. "+bar,baz" means use all default adapters and also bar and baz.

--rga-cache-compression-level=<compression-level>

ZSTD compression level to apply to adapter outputs before storing in cache db

Ranges from 1 - 22 [default: 12]

--rga-config-file=<config-file-path>

--rga-max-archive-recursion=<max-archive-recursion>

Maximum nestedness of archives to recurse into [default: 5]

--rga-cache-max-blob-len=<max-blob-len>

Max compressed size to cache

Longest byte length (after compression) to store in cache. Longer adapter outputs will not be cached and recomputed every time.

Allowed suffixes on command line: k M G [default: 2000000]

--rga-cache-path=<path>

Path to store cache db [default: /home/phire/.cache/ripgrep-all]

-h shows a concise overview, --help shows more detail and advanced options.

All other options not shown here are passed directly to rg, especially [PATTERN] and [PATH ...]

Config

The config file location leverage the mechanisms defined by

• the XDG base directory and the XDG user directory specifications on Linux (ex: ~/.config/ripgrep-all/config.jsonc)
• the Known Folder API on Windows (ex: C:\Users\Alice\AppData\Roaming\ripgrep-all/config.jsonc)
• the Standard Directories guidelines on macOS (ex: ~/Library/Application Support/ripgrep-all/config.jsonc)

Development

To enable debug logging:

export RUST_LOG=debug
export RUST_BACKTRACE=1

Also remember to disable caching with --rga-no-cache or clear the cache (~/Library/Caches/rga on macOS, ~/.cache/rga on other Unixes, or C:\Users\username\AppData\Local\rga on Windows) to debug the adapters.

Nix and Direnv

You can use the provided flake.nix to setup all build- and run-time dependencies:

1. Enable Flakes in your Nix configuration.
2. Add direnv to your profile: nix profile install nixpkgs#direnv
3. cd into the directory where you have cloned this directory.
4. Allow use of .envrc: direnv allow
5. After the dependencies have been installed, your shell will now have all of the necessary development dependencies.