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Chapter 5. Installation and configuration

5.1. Installing a binary copy

   There are three types of binary Recoll installations:

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

     o From a package downloaded from the Recoll web site.

     o 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, email 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.

  5.1.1. 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.

  5.1.2. 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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5.2. 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 follows. Many of
   the filters need the iconv command, which is not always listed as a
   dependancy.

   Please note that, due to the relatively dynamic nature of this
   information, the most up to date version is now kept on the Recoll helper
   applications page along with links to the home pages or best
   source/patches pages, and misc tips. The list below is not updated often
   and may be quite stale.

   For many Linux distributions, most of the commands listed can be installed
   from the package repositories. However, the packages are sometimes
   outdated, or not the best version for Recoll, so you should take a look at
   the Recoll helper applications page if a file type is important to you.

   As of Recoll release 1.14, a number of XML-based formats that were handled
   by ad hoc filter code now use the xsltproc command, which usually comes
   with libxslt. These are: abiword, fb2 (ebooks), kword, openoffice, svg.

   Now for the list:

     o Openoffice files need unzip and xsltproc.

     o PDF files need pdftotext which is part of the Xpdf or Poppler
       packages.

     o Postscript files need pstotext. The original version has an issue with
       shell character in file names, which is corrected in recent packages.
       See the the Recoll helper applications page for more detail.

     o MS Word needs antiword. It is also useful to have wvWare installed as
       it may be be used as a fallback for some files which antiword does not
       handle.

     o MS Excel and PowerPoint need catdoc.

     o MS Open XML (docx) needs xsltproc.

     o Wordperfect files need wpd2html from the libwpd (or libwpd-tools on
       Ubuntu) package.

     o RTF files need unrtf, which, in its standard version, has much trouble
       with non-western character sets. Check the Recoll helper applications
       page.

     o TeX files need untex or detex. Check the Recoll helper applications
       page for sources if it's not packaged for your distribution.

     o dvi files need dvips.

     o djvu files need djvutxt and djvused from the DjVuLibre package.

     o Audio files: Recoll releases before 1.13 used the id3info command from
       the id3lib package to extract mp3 tag information, metaflac (standard
       flac tools) for flac files, and ogginfo (vorbis tools) for ogg files.
       Releases 1.14 and later use a single Python filter based on mutagen
       for all audio file types.

     o 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.

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

     o ICS: up to Recoll 1.13, iCalendar files need Python and the icalendar
       module. icalendar is not needed for newer versions, which use internal
       code.

     o Zip archives need Python (and the standard zipfile module).

     o Rar archives need Python, the rarfile Python module and the unrar
       utility.

     o Midi karaoke files need Python and the Midi module

     o Konqueror webarchive format with Python (uses the Tarfile module).

     o mimehtml web archive format (support based on the email filter, which
       introduces some mild weirdness, but still usable).

   Text, HTML, email folders, and Scribus files are processed internally. Lyx
   is used to index Lyx files. Many filters need iconv and the standard sed
   and awk.

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5.3. Building from source

  5.3.1. Prerequisites

   If you can install any or all of the following through the package manager
   for your system, all the better. Especially Qt is a very big piece of
   software, but you will most probably be able to find a binary package.

   You may have to compile Xapian but this is easy.

   The shopping list:

     o C++ compiler. Up to Recoll version 1.13.04, its absence can manifest
       itself by strange messages about a missing iconv_open.

     o Development files for Xapian core.

  Important

       If you are building Xapian for an older CPU (before Pentium 4 or
       Athlon 64), you need to add the --disable-sse flag to the configure
       command. Else all Xapian application will crash with an illegal
       instruction error.

     o Development files for Qt 4 . Recoll has not been tested with Qt 5 yet.
       Recoll 1.15.9 was the last version to support Qt 3. If you do not want
       to install or build the Qt Webkit module, Recoll has a configuration
       option to disable its use (see further).

     o Development files for X11 and zlib.

     o You may also need libiconv. On Linux systems, the iconv interface is
       part of libc and you should not need to do anything special.

   Check the Recoll download page for up to date version information.

  5.3.2. Building

   Recoll has been built on Linux, FreeBSD, Mac OS X, 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.

   Configure options: 

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

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

     o --with-qzeitgeist will enable sending Zeitgeist events about the
       visited search results, and needs the qzeitgeist package.

     o --disable-webkit is available from version 1.17 to implement the
       result list with a Qt QTextBrowser instead of a WebKit widget if you
       do not or can't depend on the latter.

     o --disable-idxthreads is available from version 1.19 to suppress
       multithreading inside the indexing process. You can also use the
       run-time configuration to restrict recollindex to using a single
       thread, but the compile-time option may disable a few more unused
       locks. This only applies to the use of multithreading for the core
       index processing (data input). The Recoll monitor mode always uses at
       least two threads of execution.

     o --disable-python-module will avoid building the Python module.

     o --disable-xattr will prevent fetching data from file extended
       attributes. Beyond a few standard attributes, fetching extended
       attributes data can only be useful is some application stores data in
       there, and also needs some simple configuration (see comments in the
       fields configuration file).

     o --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).

     o --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.

     o --disable-qtgui Disable the Qt interface. Will allow building the
       indexer and the command line search program in absence of a Qt
       environment.

     o --disable-x11mon Disable X11 connection monitoring inside recollindex.
       Together with --disable-qtgui, this allows building recoll without Qt
       and X11.

     o --disable-pic will compile Recoll with position-dependant code. This
       is incompatible with building the KIO or the Python or PHP extensions,
       but might yield very marginally faster code.

     o Of course the usual autoconf configure options, like --prefix apply.

   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).

    5.3.2.1. Building on Solaris

   We did not test building the GUI on Solaris for recent versions. You will
   need at least Qt 4.4. There are some hints on an old web site page, they
   may still be valid.

   Someone did test the 1.19 indexer and Python module build, they do work,
   with a few minor glitches. Be sure to use GNU make and install.

  5.3.3. 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 either
   the system default or the value which was specified when executing
   configure (as in configure --prefix /some/path), you will have to set the
   RECOLL_DATADIR environment variable to indicate where the shared data is
   to be found (ie for (ba)sh: export
   RECOLL_DATADIR=/some/path/share/recoll).

   You can then proceed to configuration.

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                          5.4. Configuration overview
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5.4. 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/.config/Recoll.org/recoll.conf). 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 defines the parameters for one index.

   The configuration files can be edited by hand or through the Index
   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.

   By default, 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.

   In addition (as of Recoll version 1.19.7), it is possible to specify two
   additional configuration directories which will be stacked before and
   after the user configuration directory. These are defined by the
   RECOLL_CONFTOP and RECOLL_CONFMID environment variables. Values from
   configuration files inside the top directory will override user ones,
   values from configuration files inside the middle directory will override
   system ones and be overriden by user ones. These two variables may be of
   use to applications which augment Recoll functionality, and need to add
   configuration data without disturbing the user's files. Please note that
   the two, currently single, values will probably be interpreted as
   colon-separated lists in the future: do not use colon characters inside
   the directory paths.

   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:

     o Comment (starts with #) or empty.

     o Parameter affectation (name = value).

     o Section definition ([somedirname]).

   Depending on the type of configuration file, section definitions either
   separate groups of parameters or 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.

   Encoding issues. Most of the configuration parameters are plain ASCII. Two
   particular sets of values may cause encoding issues:

     o File path parameters may contain non-ascii characters and should use
       the exact same byte values as found in the file system directory.
       Usually, this means that the configuration file should use the system
       default locale encoding.

     o The unac_except_trans parameter should be encoded in UTF-8. If your
       system locale is not UTF-8, and you need to also specify non-ascii
       file paths, this poses a difficulty because common text editors cannot
       handle multiple encodings in a single file. In this relatively
       unlikely case, you can edit the configuration file as two separate
       text files with appropriate encodings, and concatenate them to create
       the complete configuration.

  5.4.1. The main configuration file, recoll.conf

   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.

   Most of the following parameters can be changed from the Index
   Configuration menu in the recoll interface. Some can only be set by
   editing the configuration file.

    5.4.1.1. Parameters affecting what documents we index:

   topdirs

           Specifies the list of directories or files to index (recursively
           for directories). You can use symbolic links as elements of this
           list. See the followLinks option about following symbolic links
           found under the top elements (not followed by default).

   skippedNames

           A space-separated list of wilcard 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,
           email 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
              

   skippedPathsFnmPathname

           The values in the *skippedPaths variables are matched by default
           with fnmatch(3), with the FNM_PATHNAME and FNM_LEADING_DIR flags.
           This means that '/' characters must be matched explicitely. You
           can set skippedPathsFnmPathname to 0 to disable the use of
           FNM_PATHNAME (meaning that /*/dir3 will match /dir1/dir2/dir3).

   zipSkippedNames

           A space-separated list of patterns for names of files or
           directories that should be ignored inside zip archives. This is
           used directly by the zip filter, and has a function similar to
           skippedNames, but works independantly. Can be redefined for
           filesystem subdirectories. For versions up to 1.19, you will need
           to update the Zip filter and install a supplementary Python
           module. The details are described on the Recoll wiki.

   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. Can be redefined for
           subdirectories.

   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).

   membermaxkbs

           This defines the maximum size in kilobytes for an archive member
           (zip, tar or rar at the moment). Bigger entries will be skipped.

   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.

   processwebqueue

           If this is set, process the directory where Web browser plugins
           copy visited pages for indexing.

   webqueuedir

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

    5.4.1.2. Parameters affecting how we generate terms:

   Changing some of these parameters will imply a full reindex. Also, when
   using multiple indexes, it may not make sense to search indexes that don't
   share the values for these parameters, because they usually affect both
   search and index operations.

   indexStripChars

           Decide if we strip characters of diacritics and convert them to
           lower-case before terms are indexed. If we don't, searches
           sensitive to case and diacritics can be performed, but the index
           will be bigger, and some marginal weirdness may sometimes occur.
           The default is a stripped index (indexStripChars = 1) for now.
           When using multiple indexes for a search, this parameter must be
           defined identically for all. Changing the value implies an index
           reset.

   maxTermExpand

           Maximum expansion count for a single term (e.g.: when using
           wildcards). The default of 10000 is reasonable and will avoid
           queries that appear frozen while the engine is walking the term
           list.

   maxXapianClauses

           Maximum number of elementary clauses we can add to a single Xapian
           query. In some cases, the result of term expansion can be
           multiplicative, and we want to avoid using excessive memory. The
           default of 100 000 should be both high enough in most cases and
           compatible with current typical hardware configurations.

   nonumbers

           If this set to true, no terms will be generated for numbers. For
           example "123", "1.5e6", 192.168.1.4, would not be indexed
           ("value123" would still be). Numbers are often quite interesting
           to search for, and this should probably not be set except for
           special situations, ie, scientific documents with huge amounts of
           numbers in them. This can only be set for a whole index, not for a
           subtree.

   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.

   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.

   unac_except_trans

           This is a list of characters, encoded in UTF-8, which should be
           handled specially when converting text to unaccented lowercase.
           For example, in Swedish, the letter a with diaeresis has full
           alphabet citizenship and should not be turned into an a. Each
           element in the space-separated list has the special character as
           first element and the translation following. The handling of both
           the lowercase and upper-case versions of a character should be
           specified, as appartenance to the list will turn-off both standard
           accent and case processing. Example for Swedish:

 unac_except_trans =  aaaa AAaa a:a: A:a: o:o: O:o:
            

           Note that the translation is not limited to a single character,
           you could very well have something like u:ue in the list.

           The default value set for unac_except_trans can't be listed here
           because I have trouble with SGML and UTF-8, but it only contains
           ligature decompositions: german ss, oe, ae, fi, fl.

           This parameter can't be defined for subdirectories, it is global,
           because there is no way to do otherwise when querying. If you have
           document sets which would need different values, you will have to
           index and query them separately.

   maildefcharset

           This can be used to define the default character set specifically
           for email 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 semi-colon (';')
           character, which there is currently no way to escape. Also note
           the initial semi-colon. Example: localfields= ;rclaptg=gnus;other
           = val, then select specifier viewer with mimetype|tag=... in
           mimeview.

   noxattrfields

           Recoll versions 1.19 and later automatically translate file
           extended attributes into document fields (to be processed
           according to the parameters from the fields file). Setting this
           variable to 1 will disable the behaviour.

   metadatacmds

           This allows executing external commands for each file and storing
           the output in Recoll document fields. This could be used for
           example to index external tag data. The value is a list of field
           names and commands, don't forget an initial semi-colon. Example:

 [/some/area/of/the/fs]
 metadatacmds = ; tags = tmsu tags %f; otherfield = somecmd -xx %f
                

           As a specially disgusting hack brought by Recoll 1.19.7, if a
           "field name" begins with rclmulti, the data returned by the
           command is expected to contain multiple field values, in
           configuration file format. This allows setting several fields by
           executing a single command. Example:

 metadatacmds = ; rclmulti1 = somecmd %f
                

           If somecmd returns data in the form of:

 field1 = value1
 field2 = value for field2
                

           field1 and field2 will be set inside the document metadata.

    5.4.1.3. 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.

   idxstatusfile

           The name of the scratch file where the indexer process updates its
           status. Default: idxstatus.txt inside the configuration directory.

   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 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 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 (or XAPIAN_FLUSH_THRESHOLD)
           documents, which gives little memory usage control, as memory
           usage also depends on average document size. The default value is
           10, and it is probably a bit low. If your system usually has free
           memory, you can try higher values between 20 and 80. In my
           experience, values beyond 100 are always counterproductive.

    5.4.1.4. Parameters affecting multithread processing

   The Recoll indexing process recollindex can use multiple threads to speed
   up indexing on multiprocessor systems. The work done to index files is
   divided in several stages and some of the stages can be executed by
   multiple threads. The stages are:

    1. File system walking: this is always performed by the main thread.
    2. File conversion and data extraction.
    3. Text processing (splitting, stemming, etc.)
    4. Xapian index update.

   You can also read a longer document about the transformation of Recoll
   indexing to multithreading.

   The threads configuration is controlled by two configuration file
   parameters.

   thrQSizes

           This variable defines the job input queues configuration. There
           are three possible queues for stages 2, 3 and 4, and this
           parameter should give the queue depth for each stage (three
           integer values). If a value of -1 is used for a given stage, no
           queue is used, and the thread will go on performing the next
           stage. In practise, deep queues have not been shown to increase
           performance. A value of 0 for the first queue tells Recoll to
           perform autoconfiguration (no need for the two other values in
           this case) - this is the default configuration.

   thrTCounts

           This defines the number of threads used for each stage. If a value
           of -1 is used for one of the queue depths, the corresponding
           thread count is ignored. It makes no sense to use a value other
           than 1 for the last stage because updating the Xapian index is
           necessarily single-threaded (and protected by a mutex).

   The following example would use three queues (of depth 2), and 4 threads
   for converting source documents, 2 for processing their text, and one to
   update the index. This was tested to be the best configuration on the test
   system (quadri-processor with multiple disks).

 thrQSizes = 2 2 2
 thrTCounts =  4 2 1

   The following example would use a single queue, and the complete
   processing for each document would be performed by a single thread
   (several documents will still be processed in parallel in most cases). The
   threads will use mutual exclusion when entering the index update stage. In
   practise the performance would be close to the precedent case in general,
   but worse in certain cases (e.g. a Zip archive would be performed purely
   sequentially), so the previous approach is preferred. YMMV... The 2 last
   values for thrTCounts are ignored.

 thrQSizes = 2 -1 -1
 thrTCounts =  6 1 1

   The following example would disable multithreading. Indexing will be
   performed by a single thread.

 thrQSizes = -1 -1 -1

    5.4.1.5. Miscellaneous parameters:

   autodiacsens

           IF the index is not stripped, decide if we automatically trigger
           diacritics sensitivity if the search term has accented characters
           (not in unac_except_trans). Else you need to use the query
           language and the D modifier to specify diacritics sensitivity.
           Default is no.

   autocasesens

           IF the index is not stripped, decide if we automatically trigger
           character case sensitivity if the search term has upper-case
           characters in any but the first position. Else you need to use the
           query language and the C modifier to specify character-case
           sensitivity. Default is yes.

   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.

   mondelaypatterns

           This allows specify wildcard path patterns (processed with
           fnmatch(3) with 0 flag), to match files which change too often and
           for which a delay should be observed before re-indexing. This is a
           space-separated list, each entry being a pattern and a time in
           seconds, separated by a colon. You can use double quotes if a path
           entry contains white space. Example:

 mondelaypatterns = *.log:20 "this one has spaces*:10"
              

   monixinterval

           Minimum interval (seconds) for processing the indexing queue. The
           real time monitor does not process each event when it comes in,
           but will wait this time for the queue to accumulate to diminish
           overhead and in order to aggregate multiple events to the same
           file. Default 30 S.

   monauxinterval

           Period (in seconds) at which the real time monitor will regenerate
           the auxiliary databases (spelling, stemming) if needed. The
           default is one hour.

   monioniceclass, monioniceclassdata

           These allow defining the ionice class and data used by the indexer
           (default class 3, no data).

   filtermaxseconds

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

   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.

   mhmboxquirks

           This allows definining location-related quirks for the mailbox
           handler. Currently only the tbird flag is defined, and it should
           be set for directories which hold Thunderbird data, as their
           folder format is weird.

  5.4.2. The fields file

   This file contains information about dynamic fields handling in Recoll.
   Some very basic fields have hard-wired behaviour, and, mostly, you should
   not change the original data inside the fields file. But you can create
   custom fields fitting your data and handle them just like they were native
   ones.

   The fields file has several sections, which each define an aspect of
   fields processing. Quite often, you'll have to modify several sections to
   obtain the desired behaviour.

   We will only give a short description here, you should refer to the
   comments inside the file for more detailed information.

   Field names should be lowercase alphabetic ASCII.

   [prefixes]

           A field becomes indexed (searchable) by having a prefix defined in
           this section.

   [stored]

           A field becomes stored (displayable inside results) by having its
           name listed in this section (typically with an empty value).

   [aliases]

           This section defines lists of synonyms for the canonical names
           used inside the [prefixes] and [stored] sections

   filter-specific sections

           Some filters may need specific configuration for handling fields.
           Only the email message filter currently has such a section (named
           [mail]). It allows indexing arbitrary email headers in addition to
           the ones indexed by default. Other such sections may appear in the
           future.

   Here follows a small example of a personal fields file. This would extract
   a specific email header and use it as a searchable field, with data
   displayable inside result lists. (Side note: as the email filter does no
   decoding on the values, only plain ascii headers can be indexed, and only
   the first occurrence will be used for headers that occur several times).

 [prefixes]
 # Index mailmytag contents (with the given prefix)
 mailmytag = XMTAG

 [stored]
 # Store mailmytag inside the document data record (so that it can be
 # displayed - as %(mailmytag) - in result lists).
 mailmytag =

 [mail]
 # Extract the X-My-Tag mail header, and use it internally with the
 # mailmytag field name
 x-my-tag = mailmytag

    5.4.2.1. Extended attributes in the fields file

   Recoll versions 1.19 and later process user extended file attributes as
   documents fields by default.

   Attributes are processed as fields of the same name, after removing the
   user prefix on Linux.

   The [xattrtofields] section of the fields file allows specifying
   translations from extended attributes names to Recoll field names. An
   empty translation disables use of the corresponding attribute data.

  5.4.3. 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.

  5.4.4. 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).

  5.4.5. The mimeview file

   mimeview specifies which programs are started when you click on an Open
   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
   GUI preferences dialog.

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

   In this case, the xallexcepts top level variable defines a list of mime
   type exceptions which will be processed according to the local entries
   instead of being passed to the desktop. This is so that specific Recoll
   options such as a page number or a search string can be passed to
   applications that support them, such as the evince viewer.

   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.

   All viewer definition 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

   The nouncompforviewmts entry, (placed at the top level, outside of the
   [view] section), holds a list of mime types that should not be
   uncompressed before starting the viewer (if they are found compressed, ie:
   mydoc.doc.gz).

   The right side of each assignment holds a command to be executed for
   opening the file. The following substitutions are performed:

     o %D. Document date

     o %f. File name. This may be the name of a temporary file if it was
       necessary to create one (ie: to extract a subdocument from a
       container).

     o %F. Original file name. Same as %f except if a temporary file is used.

     o %i. Internal path, for subdocuments of containers. The format depends
       on the container type. If this appears in the command line, Recoll
       will not create a temporary file to extract the subdocument, expecting
       the called application (possibly a script) to be able to handle it.

     o %M. Mime type

     o %p. Page index. Only significant for a subset of document types,
       currently only PDF, Postscript and DVI files. Can be used to start the
       editor at the right page for a match or snippet.

     o %s. Search term. The value will only be set for documents with indexed
       page numbers (ie: PDF). The value will be one of the matched search
       terms. It would allow pre-setting the value in the "Find" entry inside
       Evince for example, for easy highlighting of the term.

     o %U, %u. Url.

   In addition to the predefined values above, all strings like %(fieldname)
   will be replaced by the value of the field named fieldname for the
   document. This could be used in combination with field customisation to
   help with opening the document.

  5.4.6. The ptrans file

   ptrans specifies query-time path translations. These can be useful in
   multiple cases.

   The file has a section for any index which needs translations, either the
   main one or additional query indexes. The sections are named with the
   Xapian index directory names. No slash character should exist at the end
   of the paths (all comparisons are textual). An exemple should make things
   sufficiently clear

           [/home/me/.recoll/xapiandb]
           /this/directory/moved = /to/this/place

           [/path/to/additional/xapiandb]
           /server/volume1/docdir = /net/server/volume1/docdir
           /server/volume2/docdir = /net/server/volume2/docdir
        

  5.4.7. Examples of configuration adjustments

    5.4.7.1. 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 Open 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:

     o 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.

     o 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.

    5.4.7.2. 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):

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

 application/x-blobapp = exec rclblob

     o 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.

     o 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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