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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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