# se-simulator Generating fun Stack Exchange questions using Markov chains ### [try it out](http://se-simulator.lw1.at/) ### Requirements - python 3.5+ (only tested with python 3.6) - 7z For Debian and similar distribution install with: ```bash sudo apt-get install p7zip-full ``` ### Setup - git clone with submodules ```bash git clone https://github.com/Findus23/se-simulator cd se-simulator git submodule init git submodule update ``` - `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](https://archive.org/details/stackexchange] `.7z` files for the sites you want to generate (it's recommend to start with 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