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

You can use rga interactively via fzf. Add the following to your ~/.{bash,zsh}rc:

rga-fzf() {
	RG_PREFIX="rga --files-with-matches --rga-cache-max-blob-len=10M"
	local file
	file="$(
		FZF_DEFAULT_COMMAND="$RG_PREFIX '$1'" \
			fzf --sort --preview="[[ ! -z {} ]] && rga --pretty --context 5 {q} {}" \
				--phony -q "$1" \
				--bind "change:reload:$RG_PREFIX {q}" \
				--preview-window="70%:wrap"
	)" &&
	echo "opening $file" &&
	xdg-open "$file"
}

INSTALLATION

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

Linux

On Arch Linux, you can simply install from AUR: yay -S ripgrep-all.

On Debian-based distributions you can download the rga binary and get the dependencies like this:

apt install ripgrep pandoc poppler-utils ffmpeg cargo

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

Install ripgrep-all via Chocolatey:

choco install ripgrep-all

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

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 tesseract ffmpeg

Compile from source

rga should compile with stable Rust (v1.36.0+, 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 ripgrep_all
   ~$ rga --version    # this should work now

Available Adapters

rga --rga-list-adapters

Adapters:

• ffmpeg Uses ffmpeg to extract video metadata/chapters and subtitles
  Extensions: .mkv, .mp4, .avi

• pandoc Uses pandoc to convert binary/unreadable text documents to plain markdown-like text
  Extensions: .epub, .odt, .docx, .fb2, .ipynb

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

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

• decompress Reads compressed file as a stream and runs a different extractor on the contents.
  Extensions: .tgz, .tbz, .tbz2, .gz, .bz2, .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=+pdfpages,tesseract':

• pdfpages Converts a pdf to its individual pages as png files. Only useful in combination with tesseract
  Extensions: .pdf
  Mime Types: application/pdf

• tesseract Uses tesseract to run OCR on images to make them searchable. May need -j1 to prevent overloading the system. Make sure you have tesseract installed.
  Extensions: .jpg, .png

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).

-h, --help

Prints help information

--rga-list-adapters

List all known adapters

--rga-no-cache

Disable caching of results

By default, rga caches the extracted text, if it is small enough, to a database in ~/.cache/rga on Linux, ~/Library/Caches/rga on macOS, or C:\Users\username\AppData\Local\rga 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.

--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=<cache-compression-level>

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

Ranges from 1 - 22 [default: 12]

--rga-cache-max-blob-len=<cache-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: k M G [default: 2000000]

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

Maximum nestedness of archives to recurse into [default: 4]

-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

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.