Bible Search

Welcome to Bible Search, a semantic search application that helps you discover Bible verses in a more intuitive way. Instead of relying on keyword matching, this tool uses sentence embeddings to find verses that are contextually and semantically similar to your query.

How It Works

This project is composed of two main parts: a backend API and a frontend client.

How it works - A detailed blog post explaining the architecture and implementation of the Bible Search application.

Backend API

The API is built with Python and FastAPI. It leverages the power of sentence transformers and a FAISS (Facebook AI Similarity Search) index to perform lightning-fast semantic searches.

• Sentence Transformers: The paraphrase-MiniLM-L3-v2 model is used to convert the entire Bible (verse by verse) into high-dimensional vector embeddings. The same model is used to encode user queries at runtime.
• FAISS: The vector embeddings of the Bible verses are stored in a FAISS index. This allows for incredibly efficient similarity searches, finding the closest matches to a query vector from over 31,000 verses in milliseconds.
• FastAPI: Provides a simple and fast web server to expose the search functionality through a REST API endpoint.

Frontend Client

The client is a modern, responsive web application built with React and Vite.

• React: Used to build the user interface, providing a dynamic and interactive experience.
• Vite: A next-generation frontend tooling that provides a faster and leaner development experience.
• Tailwind CSS: For styling the application with a utility-first CSS framework.

Getting Started Locally

To run this project on your local machine, you'll need to have Node.js and Python installed.

1. Backend API Setup

First, set up and run the backend server.

# Navigate to the api directory
cd api

# It's recommended to use a virtual environment
python -m venv venv
# On Windows
venv\Scripts\activate
# On macOS/Linux
source venv/bin/activate

# Install the required Python packages
pip install -r requirements.txt

# Run the FastAPI server
# The server will be available at http://localhost:10000
uvicorn app:app --host 0.0.0.0 --port 10000

2. Frontend Client Setup

Next, set up and run the frontend client in a separate terminal.

# Navigate to the client directory
cd client

# Install the required npm packages
npm install

# Run the development server
# The application will be available at http://localhost:5173
npm run dev

Once both the backend and frontend are running, you can open your browser and navigate to http://localhost:5173 to use the application.

Docker

A Dockerfile is provided to containerize the backend API.

# Build the Docker image from the root directory
docker build -t bible-search-api .

# Run the container
# This will map port 10000 on your host to port 10000 in the container
docker run -p 10000:10000 bible-search-api