🚀 langchain-stackoverflow

LangChain retrievers for Stack Overflow — search questions and fetch full answers across the Stack Exchange network as LangChain Document objects. No API keys required (optional for higher rate limits).

Perfect for building coding assistants, RAG applications, and troubleshooting agents.

✨ Features

📦 Installation

pip install langchain-stackoverflow

🚀 Quick Start

Search Questions

from langchain_stackoverflow import StackOverflowSearchRetriever

retriever = StackOverflowSearchRetriever(
    max_results=3,
    sort="votes",           # "relevance", "votes", "creation", "activity"
    site="stackoverflow",   # any Stack Exchange site (e.g. "serverfault")
    tagged="python;pandas", # Optional: filter by tags
    accepted_only=True,     # Optional: only show questions with accepted answers
)

docs = retriever.invoke("how to merge dataframes")

for doc in docs:
    print(f"❓ {doc.page_content.splitlines()[0]}") # Print question title
    print(f"   👍 {doc.metadata['score']} votes | 💬 {doc.metadata['answer_count']} answers")
    print(f"   🔗 {doc.metadata['url']}")

Fetch Answers

from langchain_stackoverflow import StackOverflowAnswerRetriever

retriever = StackOverflowAnswerRetriever(sort="votes")

# Pass the Stack Overflow URL or just the question ID
docs = retriever.invoke("https://stackoverflow.com/questions/53645882/pandas-merge-two-dataframes-with-different-columns")

for doc in docs:
    if doc.metadata['is_accepted']:
        print("✅ ACCEPTED ANSWER:")
    else:
        print("💡 ANSWER:")
    
    print(f"Score: {doc.metadata['score']}")
    print(f"{doc.page_content[:150]}...\n")

🔑 Rate Limits & API Keys

By default, the Stack Exchange API allows 300 requests per day per IP address without an API key.

If you need more, you can register a free app at Stack Apps to get an API key, which increases your quota to 10,000 requests per day.

Pass your key to the retriever:

retriever = StackOverflowSearchRetriever(api_key="your_key_here")

📄 License

MIT — see LICENSE for details.