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+# se-simulator
+Generating fun Stack Exchange questions using Markov chains
+
+###[try it out](http://se-simulator.lw1.at/)
+
+
+### Setup
+
+- `pip install -r requirements.txt`
+- create a MySQL database called `se-simulator`
+- rename `config.sample.py` to `config.py` and fill in the database details and create a `secret_key`
+- run `create.py`, which creates the database and fetches the list of SE sites
+- run `apply_colors.py` (which should run really quickly)
+- create folders called `chains`, `download` and `raw` (or syminks to somewhere where more disk space is left)
+- download the `.7z` files for the sites you want to generate (I'd recommend to use a file <100MB)
+    - If the `.7z` has another name as the site has now, rename it
+- run `consume.py`
+    - It should check the hash, move the file to `raw/`, unpack it and extract the needed content from the `.xml` files into new `.jsonl` files. It also writes the data of the file into the db, so it won't be imported again.
+- now the most important step: run `todb.py`
+    - this will generate the markov chains and save them (or use existing ones on the next run)
+    - afterwards 100 questions will be added to the db, with corresponding answers, titles and usernames
+- run `shuffle.py`
+    - I haven't found a performant way to get a random question without asigning every question an integer and saving the maximum to `count.txt`
+- run `server.py`
+    - this starts the Flask server on `http://127.0.0.1:5000/`
+    - if I didn't miss an important step, the site should be working fine now.
+    
+### other files
+
+- `app.py`: needed for Flask
+- `basemodel.py` and `models.py`: [peewee](https://github.com/coleifer/peewee/) ORM
+- `extra_data.py`: manually collected colors of every site with an custom theme
+- `markov.py`: extending the great [markovify library](https://github.com/jsvine/markovify/) for my use case
+- `parsexml.py`: reading in the Stack Exchange dump XML files with no more than 40MB RAM usage.
+- `text_generator.py`: everything that creates the content and handles the Markov chains
+- `updater.py`: probably not working anymore, checks for newer dump files
+- `utils.py`: everything else