Search in offline mode

[niskrev]

Description

Is it possible to enable search in rendered documents (website, blog, book) in offline mode? The search box appears but shows no results.

[mcanouil]

It should work.
I've just tried locally and offline with my own website.

[niskrev]

It doesn't work when I open _site/index.html in the browser. I am interested in using this for offline documentation, similar to MkDocs

[mcanouil]

I don't know what you are doing, but it works perfectly offline.

1. I turned off network connection.
2. quarto create project website demo

See the results

Screen.Recording.2024-01-02.at.13.10.06.mov

Note that JavaScript cannot run from file protocol.

[niskrev]

As I said, the search doesn't work when I open _site/index.html in the browser. This is what I mean by offline mode - without starting a local preview server. Offline search is available in MkDocs and Jupyter Book. My question is whether it is available with Quarto as well. Thanks!

[cscheid]

FYI, A large number of modern javascript features simply don't work when you use the file:// protocol. That's by design, because of security concerns. As a result, a number of quarto features don't work either. Search and OJS code cells are some of the examples.

MkDocs and JupyterBook probably are using a different searching library that doesn't hit the javascript security limitations. I would encourage you to use the preview server (or a local server like the one that is bundled with Python, via python -m http.server).

[niskrev]

So the answer is no. Thanks for clarifying

[cscheid]

More accurately, you're not using offline mode. You can still be offline, disconnected from the internet, and have local search working. You do need an HTTP server (local or not).

[LJFRIESE]

For future scavengers, there is a workaround:

Step 1: After building the site, comment out the following in site_libs/quarto-search/quarto-search.js

if (window.location.protocol === "file:" && !shownWarning) {
      window.alert(
        "Search requires JavaScript features disabled when running in file://... URLs. In order to use search, please run this document in a web server."
      );
      shownWarning = true;
      return;
    }

Step 2: Create a .bat file in the site root directory with the following

REM Kill all existing instance of chrome 
taskkill /F /IM chrome.exe /T
REM directory path where chrome.exe is located
set chromeLocation="C:\Program Files (x86)\Google\Chrome\Application"
cd %chromeLocation%
cd c:
start chrome.exe "{path to index}\index.html" --allow-file-access-from-files

NB: See this SO discussion for an explanation of what the --allow-file-access-from-files tag does and why you shouldn't use the window opened by this script for web browsing.