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More documentation can be found in the doc/ directory or at http://www.recoll.org


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                            Chapter 7. Installation

   Table of Contents

   7.1. Installing a binary copy

   7.2. Supporting packages

   7.3. Building from source

   7.4. Configuration overview

   7.5. The KDE Kicker Recoll applet

                         7.1. Installing a binary copy

   There are three types of binary Recoll installations:

     * Through your system normal software distribution framework (ie,
       Debian/Ubuntu apt, FreeBSD ports, etc.).

     * From a package downloaded from the Recoll web site.

     * From a prebuilt tree downloaded from the Recoll web site.

   In all cases, the strict software dependancies (ie on Xapian or iconv)
   will be automatically satisfied, you should not have to worry about them.

   You will only have to check or install supporting applications for the
   file types that you want to index beyond those that are natively processed
   by Recoll (text, HTML, mail files, and a few others).

   You should also maybe have a look at the configuration section (but this
   may not be necessary for a quick test with default parameters). Most
   parameters can be more conveniently set from the GUI interface.

7.1.1. Installing through a package system

   If you use a BSD-type port system or a prebuilt package (DEB, RPM,
   manually or through the system software configuration utility), just
   follow the usual procedure for your system.

7.1.2. Installing a prebuilt Recoll

   The unpackaged binary versions on the Recoll web site are just compressed
   tar files of a build tree, where only the useful parts were kept
   (executables and sample configuration).

   The executable binary files are built with a static link to libxapian and
   libiconv, to make installation easier (no dependencies).

   After extracting the tar file, you can proceed with installation as if you
   had built the package from source (that is, just type make install). The
   binary trees are built for installation to /usr/local.

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                            7.2. Supporting packages

   Recoll uses external applications to index some file types. You need to
   install them for the file types that you wish to have indexed (these are
   run-time optional dependencies. None is needed for building or running
   Recoll except for indexing their specific file type).

   After an indexing pass, the commands that were found missing can be
   displayed from the recoll File menu. The list is stored in the missing
   text file inside the configuration directory.

   A list of common file types which need external commands:

     * Openoffice: supported natively, but needs the unzip command to be
       installed.

     * PDF: pdftotext is part of the Xpdf package.

     * Postscript: pstotext.

     * MS Word: antiword.

     * MS Excel and PowerPoint: catdoc.

     * Wordperfect files: libwpd.

     * RTF: unrtf

     * TeX: Recoll uses the untex program. Your distribution may have a
       package for it. If it doesn't, there is a copy of the source on the
       Recoll web site, because the program has no obvious home. The filter
       can also work with detex and will use it if it is installed.

     * dvi: dvips

     * djvu: DjVuLibre

     * mp3: Recoll will use the id3info command from the id3lib package to
       extract tag information. Without it, only the file names will be
       indexed.

     * flac files need metaflac.

     * ogg files need ogginfo.

     * Pictures: Recoll uses the Exiftool Perl package to extract tag
       information. Most image file formats are supported. Note that there
       may not be much interest in indexing the technical tags (image size,
       aperture, etc.). This is only of interest if you store personal tags
       or textual descriptions inside the image files.

     * chm: files in microsoft help format need Python and the pychm module
       (which needs chmlib).

     * ics: iCalendar files need Python and the icalendar module.

     * zip: Zip archives need Python (and the standard zipfile module).

   Text, HTML, mail folders, Openoffice and Scribus files are processed
   internally. Lyx is used to index Lyx files. Many filters need sed and awk.

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                           7.3. Building from source

7.3.1. Prerequisites

   At the very least, you will need to download and install the xapian core
   package and the qt run-time and development packages. Check the Recoll
   download page for up to date version information.

   You will most probably be able to find a binary package for qt for your
   system. You may have to compile Xapian but this is not difficult (if you
   are using FreeBSD, there is a port).

   You may also need libiconv. Recoll currently uses version 1.9 (this should
   not be critical). On Linux systems, the iconv interface is part of libc
   and you should not need to do anything special.

7.3.2. Building

   Recoll has been built on Linux, FreeBSD, macosx, and Solaris, most
   versions after 2005 should be ok, maybe some older ones too (Solaris 8 is
   ok). If you build on another system, and need to modify things, I would
   very much welcome patches.

   Depending on the qt configuration on your system, you may have to set the
   QTDIR and QMAKESPECS variables in your environment:

     * QTDIR should point to the directory above the one that holds the qt
       include files (ie: if qt.h is /usr/local/qt/include/qt.h, QTDIR should
       be /usr/local/qt).

     * QMAKESPECS should be set to the name of one of the qt mkspecs
       sub-directories (ie: linux-g++).

   On many Linux systems, QTDIR is set by the login scripts, and QMAKESPECS
   is not needed because there is a default link in mkspecs/. Neither should
   be needed with Qt 4.

   Configure options:

     * --without-aspell will disable the code for phonetic matching of search
       terms.

     * --with-fam or --with-inotify will enable the code for real time
       indexing. Inotify support is enabled by default on recent Linux
       systems.

     * --enable-xattr will enable code to fetch data from file extended
       attributes. This is only useful is some application stores data in
       there, and also needs some simple configuration (see comments in the
       fields configuration file).

     * --enable-camelcase will enable splitting camelCase words. This is not
       enabled by default as it has the unfortunate side-effect of making
       some phrase searches quite confusing: ie, "MySQL manual" would be
       matched by "MySQL manual" and "my sql manual" but not "mysql manual"
       (only inside phrase searches).

     * --with-file-command Specify the version of the 'file' command to use
       (ie: --with-file-command=/usr/local/bin/file). Can be useful to enable
       the gnu version on systems where the native one is bad.

     * --without-gui Disable the Qt interface, and auxiliary uses of X11, and
       compile the command line version.

   Normal procedure:

         cd recoll-xxx
         configure
         make
         (practices usual hardship-repelling invocations)
     

   There is little auto-configuration. The configure script will mainly link
   one of the system-specific files in the mk directory to mk/sysconf. If
   your system is not known yet, it will tell you as much, and you may want
   to manually copy and modify one of the existing files (the new file name
   should be the output of uname -s).

7.3.3. Installation

   Either type make install or execute recollinstall prefix, in the root of
   the source tree. This will copy the commands to prefix/bin and the sample
   configuration files, scripts and other shared data to prefix/share/recoll.

   If the installation prefix given to recollinstall is different from what
   was specified when executing configure, you will have to set the
   RECOLL_DATADIR environment variable to indicate where the shared data is
   to be found.

   You can then proceed to configuration.

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                          7.4. Configuration overview

   Most of the parameters specific to the recoll GUI are set through the
   Preferences menu and stored in the standard Qt place ($HOME/.qt/recollrc).
   You probably do not want to edit this by hand.

   Recoll indexing options are set inside text configuration files located in
   a configuration directory. There can be several such directories, each of
   which define the parameters for one index.

   The configuration files can be edited by hand or through the Indexing
   configuration dialog (Preferences menu). The GUI tool will try to respect
   your formatting and comments as much as possible, so it is quite possible
   to use both ways.

   The most accurate documentation for the configuration parameters is given
   by comments inside the default files, and we will just give a general
   overview here.

   For each index, there are two sets of configuration files. System-wide
   configuration files are kept in a directory named like
   /usr/[local/]share/recoll/examples, and define default values, shared by
   all indexes. For each index, a parallel set of files defines the
   customized parameters.

   The default location of the configuration is the .recoll directory in your
   home. Most people will only use this directory.

   This location can be changed, or others can be added with the
   RECOLL_CONFDIR environment variable or the -c option parameter to recoll
   and recollindex.

   If the .recoll directory does not exist when recoll or recollindex are
   started, it will be created with a set of empty configuration files.
   recoll will give you a chance to edit the configuration file before
   starting indexing. recollindex will proceed immediately. To avoid
   mistakes, the automatic directory creation will only occur for the default
   location, not if -c or RECOLL_CONFDIR were used (in the latter cases, you
   will have to create the directory).

   All configuration files share the same format. For example, a short
   extract of the main configuration file might look as follows:

         # Space-separated list of directories to index.
         topdirs =  ~/docs /usr/share/doc

         [~/somedirectory-with-utf8-txt-files]
         defaultcharset = utf-8
       

   There are three kinds of lines:

     * Comment (starts with #) or empty.

     * Parameter affectation (name = value).

     * Section definition ([somedirname]).

   Section definitions allow redefining some parameters for a directory
   sub-tree. They stay in effect until another section definition, or the end
   of file, is encountered. Some of the parameters used for indexing are
   looked up hierarchically from the current directory location upwards. Not
   all parameters can be meaningfully redefined, this is specified for each
   in the next section.

   When found at the beginning of a file path, the tilde character (~) is
   expanded to the name of the user's home directory, as a shell would do.

   White space is used for separation inside lists. List elements with
   embedded spaces can be quoted using double-quotes.

7.4.1. Main configuration file

   recoll.conf is the main configuration file. It defines things like what to
   index (top directories and things to ignore), and the default character
   set to use for document types which do not specify it internally.

   The default configuration will index your home directory. If this is not
   appropriate, start recoll to create a blank configuration, click Cancel,
   and edit the configuration file before restarting the command. This will
   start the initial indexing, which may take some time.

   Paramers affecting what we index:

   topdirs

           Specifies the list of directories or files to index (recursively
           for directories). The indexer will not follow symbolic links
           inside the indexed trees by default (see the followLinks options
           though).

   skippedNames

           A space-separated list of patterns for names of files or
           directories that should be completely ignored. The list defined in
           the default file is:

 skippedNames = #* bin CVS  Cache cache* caughtspam  tmp .thumbnails .svn \
            *~ .beagle .git .hg .bzr loop.ps .xsession-errors \
            .recoll* xapiandb recollrc recoll.conf

           The list can be redefined at any sub-directory in the indexed
           area.

           The top-level directories are not affected by this list (that is,
           a directory in topdirs might match and would still be indexed).

           The list in the default configuration does not exclude hidden
           directories (names beginning with a dot), which means that it may
           index quite a few things that you do not want. On the other hand,
           mail user agents like thunderbird usually store messages in hidden
           directories, and you probably want this indexed. One possible
           solution is to have .* in skippedNames, and add things like
           ~/.thunderbird or ~/.evolution in topdirs.

           Not even the file names are indexed for patterns in this list. See
           the recoll_noindex variable in mimemap for an alternative approach
           which indexes the file names.

   skippedPaths and daemSkippedPaths

           A space-separated list of patterns for paths of files or
           directories that should be skipped. There is no default in the
           sample configuration file, but the code always adds the
           configuration and database directories in there.

           skippedPaths is used both by batch and real time indexing.
           daemSkippedPaths can be used to specify things that should be
           indexed at startup, but not monitored.

           Example of use for skipping text files only in a specific
           directory:

 skippedPaths = ~/somedir/*.txt
             

   followLinks

           Specifies if the indexer should follow symbolic links while
           walking the file tree. The default is to ignore symbolic links to
           avoid multiple indexing of linked files. No effort is made to
           avoid duplication when this option is set to true. This option can
           be set individually for each of the topdirs members by using
           sections. It can not be changed below the topdirs level.

   indexedmimetypes

           Recoll normally indexes any file which it knows how to read. This
           list lets you restrict the indexed mime types to what you specify.
           If the variable is unspecified or the list empty (the default),
           all supported types are processed.

   compressedfilemaxkbs

           Size limit for compressed (.gz or .bz2) files. These need to be
           decompressed in a temporary directory for identification, which
           can be very wasteful if 'uninteresting' big compressed files are
           present. Negative means no limit, 0 means no processing of any
           compressed file. Defaults to -1.

   textfilemaxmbs

           Maximum size for text files. Very big text files are often
           uninteresting logs. Set to -1 to disable (default 20MB).

   textfilepagekbs

           If set to other than -1, text files will be indexed as multiple
           documents of the given page size. This may be useful if you do
           want to index very big text files as it will both reduce memory
           usage at index time and help with loading data to the preview
           window. A size of a few megabytes would seem reasonable (default:
           1MB).

   indexallfilenames

           Recoll indexes file names in a special section of the database to
           allow specific file names searches using wild cards. This
           parameter decides if file name indexing is performed only for
           files with mime types that would qualify them for full text
           indexing, or for all files inside the selected subtrees,
           independently of mime type.

   usesystemfilecommand

           Decide if we use the file -i system command as a final step for
           determining the mime type for a file (the main procedure uses
           suffix associations as defined in the mimemap file). This can be
           useful for files with suffix-less names, but it will also cause
           the indexing of many bogus "text" files.

   processbeaglequeue

           If this is set, process the directory where Beagle Web browser
           plugins copy visited pages for indexing. Of course, Beagle MUST
           NOT be running, else things will behave strangely.

   beaglequeuedir

           The path to the Beagle indexing queue. This is hard-coded in the
           Beagle plugin as ~/.beagle/ToIndex so there should be no need to
           change it.

   Parameters affecting where and how we store things:

   dbdir

           The name of the Xapian data directory. It will be created if
           needed when the index is initialized. If this is not an absolute
           path, it will be interpreted relative to the configuration
           directory. The value can have embedded spaces but starting or
           trailing spaces will be trimmed. You cannot use quotes here.

   maxfsoccuppc

           Maximum file system occupation before we stop indexing. The value
           is a percentage, corresponding to what the "Capacity" df output
           column shows. The default value is 0, meaning no checking.

   mboxcachedir

           The directory where mbox message offsets cache files are held.
           This is normally $RECOLL_CONFDIR/mboxcache, but it may be useful
           to share a directory between different configurations.

   mboxcacheminmbs

           The minimum mbox file size over which we cache the offsets. There
           is really no sense in caching offsets for small files. The default
           is 5 MB.

   webcachedir

           This is only used by the Beagle web browser plugin indexing code,
           and defines where the cache for visited pages will live. Default:
           $RECOLL_CONFDIR/webcache

   webcachemaxmbs

           This is only used by the Beagle web browser plugin indexing code,
           and defines the maximum size for the web page cache. Default: 40
           MB.

   idxflushmb

           Threshold (megabytes of new text data) where we flush from memory
           to disk index. Setting this can help control memory usage. A value
           of 0 means no explicit flushing, letting Xapian use its own
           default, which is flushing every 10000 documents (memory usage
           depends on average document size). The default value is 10.

   Miscellani:

   loglevel,daemloglevel

           Verbosity level for recoll and recollindex. A value of 4 lists
           quite a lot of debug/information messages. 2 only lists errors.
           The daemversion is specific to the indexing monitor daemon.

   logfilename, daemlogfilename

           Where the messages should go. 'stderr' can be used as a special
           value, and is the default. The daemversion is specific to the
           indexing monitor daemon.

   indexstemminglanguages

           A list of languages for which the stem expansion databases will be
           built. See recollindex(1) or use the recollindex -l command for
           possible values. You can add a stem expansion database for a
           different language by using recollindex -s, but it will be deleted
           during the next indexing. Only languages listed in the
           configuration file are permanent.

   defaultcharset

           The name of the character set used for files that do not contain a
           character set definition (ie: plain text files). This can be
           redefined for any sub-directory. If it is not set at all, the
           character set used is the one defined by the nls environment
           (LC_ALL, LC_CTYPE, LANG), or iso8859-1 if nothing is set.

   filtermaxseconds

           Maximum filter execution time, after which it is aborted. Some
           postscript programs just loop...

   maildefcharset

           This can be used to define the default character set specifically
           for mail messages which don't specify it. This is mainly useful
           for readpst (libpst) dumps, which are utf-8 but do not say so.

   localfields

           This allows setting fields for all documents under a given
           directory. Typical usage would be to set an "rclaptg" field, to be
           used in mimeview to select a specific viewer. If several fields
           are to be set, they should be separated with a ':' character
           (which there is currently no way to escape). Ie: localfields=
           rclaptg=gnus:other = val, then select specifier viewer with
           mimetype|tag=... in mimeview.

   filtersdir

           A directory to search for the external filter scripts used to
           index some types of files. The value should not be changed, except
           if you want to modify one of the default scripts. The value can be
           redefined for any sub-directory.

   iconsdir

           The name of the directory where recoll result list icons are
           stored. You can change this if you want different images.

   idxabsmlen

           Recoll stores an abstract for each indexed file inside the
           database. The text can come from an actual 'abstract' section in
           the document or will just be the beginning of the document. It is
           stored in the index so that it can be displayed inside the result
           lists without decoding the original file. The idxabsmlen parameter
           defines the size of the stored abstract. The default value is 250
           bytes. The search interface gives you the choice to display this
           stored text or a synthetic abstract built by extracting text
           around the search terms. If you always prefer the synthetic
           abstract, you can reduce this value and save a little space.

   aspellLanguage

           Language definitions to use when creating the aspell dictionary.
           The value must match a set of aspell language definition files.
           You can type "aspell config" to see where these are installed
           (look for data-dir). The default if the variable is not set is to
           use your desktop national language environment to guess the value.

   noaspell

           If this is set, the aspell dictionary generation is turned off.
           Useful for cases where you don't need the functionality or when it
           is unusable because aspell crashes during dictionary generation.

   nocjk

           If this set to true, specific east asian (Chinese Korean Japanese)
           characters/word splitting is turned off. This will save a small
           amount of cpu if you have no CJK documents. If your document base
           does include such text but you are not interested in searching it,
           setting nocjk may be a significant time and space saver.

   cjkngramlen

           This lets you adjust the size of n-grams used for indexing CJK
           text. The default value of 2 is probably appropriate in most
           cases. A value of 3 would allow more precision and efficiency on
           longer words, but the index will be approximately twice as large.

   guesscharset

           Decide if we try to guess the character set of files if no
           internal value is available (ie: for plain text files). This does
           not work well in general, and should probably not be used.

7.4.2. The mimemap file

   mimemap specifies the file name extension to mime type mappings.

   For file names without an extension, or with an unknown one, the system's
   file -i command will be executed to determine the mime type (this can be
   switched off inside the main configuration file).

   The mappings can be specified on a per-subtree basis, which may be useful
   in some cases. Example: gaim logs have a .txt extension but should be
   handled specially, which is possible because they are usually all located
   in one place.

   mimemap also has a recoll_noindex variable which is a list of suffixes.
   Matching files will be skipped (which avoids unnecessary decompressions or
   file executions). This is partially redundant with skippedNames in the
   main configuration file, with a few differences: it will not affect
   directories, it cannot be made dependant on the file-system location (it
   is a configuration-wide parameter), and the file names will still be
   indexed (not even the file names are indexed for patterns in skippedNames.
   recoll_noindex is used mostly for things known to be unindexable by a
   given Recoll version. Having it there avoids cluttering the more
   user-oriented and locally customized skippedNames.

7.4.3. The mimeconf file

   mimeconf specifies how the different mime types are handled for indexing,
   and which icons are displayed in the recoll result lists.

   Changing the parameters in the [index] section is probably not a good idea
   except if you are a Recoll developer.

   The [icons] section allows you to change the icons which are displayed by
   recoll in the result lists (the values are the basenames of the png images
   inside the iconsdir directory (specified in recoll.conf).

7.4.4. The mimeview file

   mimeview specifies which programs are started when you click on an Edit
   link in a result list. Ie: HTML is normally displayed using firefox, but
   you may prefer Konqueror, your openoffice.org program might be named
   oofice instead of openoffice etc.

   Changes to this file can be done by direct editing, or through the recoll
   user preferences dialog.

   As for the other configuration files, the normal usage is to have a
   mimeview inside your own configuration directory, with just the
   non-default entries, which will override those from the central
   configuration file.

   Please note that these entries must be placed under a [view] section.

   The keys in the file are normally mime types. You can add an application
   tag to specialize the choice for an area of the filesystem (using a
   localfields specification in mimeconf). The syntax for the key is
   mimetype|tag

   If Use desktop preferences to choose document editor is checked in the
   user preferences, all mimeview entries will be ignored except the one
   labelled application/x-all (which is set to use xdg-open by default).

7.4.5. Examples of configuration adjustments

  7.4.5.1. Adding an external viewer for an non-indexed type

   Imagine that you have some kind of file which does not have indexable
   content, but for which you would like to have a functional Edit link in
   the result list (when found by file name). The file names end in .blob and
   can be displayed by application blobviewer.

   You need two entries in the configuration files for this to work:

     * In $RECOLL_CONFDIR/mimemap (typically ~/.recoll/mimemap), add the
       following line:

 .blob = application/x-blobapp

       Note that the mime type is made up here, and you could call it
       diesel/oil just the same.

     * In $RECOLL_CONFDIR/mimeview under the [view] section, add:

 application/x-blobapp = blobviewer %f

       We are supposing that blobviewer wants a file name parameter here, you
       would use %u if it liked URLs better.

   If you just wanted to change the application used by Recoll to display a
   mime type which it already knows, you would just need to edit mimeview.
   The entries you add in your personal file override those in the central
   configuration, which you do not need to alter. mimeview can also be
   modified from the Gui.

  7.4.5.2. Adding indexing support for a new file type

   Let us now imagine that the above .blob files actually contain indexable
   text and that you know how to extract it with a command line program.
   Getting Recoll to index the files is easy. You need to perform the above
   alteration, and also to add data to the mimeconf file (typically in
   ~/.recoll/mimeconf):

     * Under the [index] section, add the following line (more about the
       rclblob indexing script later):

 application/x-blobapp = exec rclblob

     * Under the [icons] section, you should choose an icon to be displayed
       for the files inside the result lists. Icons are normally 64x64 pixels
       PNG files which live in /usr/[local/]share/recoll/images.

     * Under the [categories] section, you should add the mime type where it
       makes sense (you can also create a category). Categories may be used
       for filtering in advanced search.

   The rclblob filter should be an executable program or script which exists
   inside /usr/[local/]share/recoll/filters. It will be given a file name as
   argument and should output the text or html contents on the standard
   output.

   The filter programming section describes in more detail how to write a
   filter.

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