NAME¶
recoll.conf - main personal configuration file for Recoll
DESCRIPTION¶
This file defines the indexation configuration for the Recoll full-text search
system.
The system-wide configuration file is normally located inside
/usr/[local]/share/recoll/examples. Any parameter set in the common file may
be overridden by setting it in the personal configuration file, by default:
$HOME/.recoll/recoll.conf
Please note while we try to keep this manual page reasonably up to date, it will
frequently lag the current state of the software. The best source of
information about the configuration are the comments in the configuration
file.
A short extract of the 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 or empty
- •
- Parameter affectation
- •
- Section definition
Empty lines or lines beginning with # are ignored.
Affectation lines are in the form 'name = value'.
Section lines allow redefining a parameter for a directory subtree. Some of the
parameters used for indexaction are looked up hierarchically from the more to
the less specific. Not all parameters can be meaningfully redefined, this is
specified for each in the next section.
The tilde character (~) is expanded in file names to the name of the user's home
directory.
Where values are lists, white space is used for separation, and elements with
embedded spaces can be quoted with double-quotes.
OPTIONS¶
- topdirs = directories
- Specifies the list of directories to index (recursively).
- dbdir = directory
- The name of the Xapian database directory. It will be created if needed
when the database is initialized. If this is not an absolute pathname, it
will be taken relative to the configuration directory.
- skippedNames = patterns
- 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:
*~ #* bin CVS Cache caughtspam tmp
The list can be redefined for subdirectories, but is only actually changed
for the top level ones in topdirs
- skippedPaths = patterns
- A space-separated list of patterns for paths the indexer should not
descend into. Together with topdirs, this allows pruning the indexed tree
to one's content. daemSkippedPaths can be used to define a specific value
for the real time indexing monitor.
- followLinks = boolean
- 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.
- loglevel = value
- Verbosity level for recoll and recollindex. A value of 4 lists quite a lot
of debug/information messages. 3 lists only errors. daemloglevel
can be used to specify a different value for the real-time indexing
daemon.
- logfilename = file
- Where should the messages go. 'stderr' can be used as a special value.
daemlogfilename can be used to specify a different value for the
real-time indexing daemon.
- indexstemminglanguages = languages
- A list of languages for which the stem expansion databases will be built.
See recollindex(1) for possible values.
- defaultcharset = charset
- 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 subdirectory.
- maxfsoccuppc = percentnumber
- 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.
- idxflushmb = megabytes
- 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 (or XAPIAN_FLUSH_THRESHOLD), meaning that memory
usage depends on average document size. The default value is 10.
- filtersdir = directory
- 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
subdirectory.
- iconsdir = directory
- The name of the directory where recoll result list icons are
stored. You can change this if you want different images.
- guesscharset = boolean
- 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.
- usesystemfilecommand = boolean
- 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 suffixless names, but it will also cause the indexation of
many bogus "text" files.
- indexedmimetypes = list
- 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 = value
- 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.
- indexallfilenames = boolean
- Recoll indexes file names into 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 indexation, or for all files inside the
selected subtrees, independent of mime type.
- idxabsmlen = value
- 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 = lang
- 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 = boolean
- 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 = boolean
- 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 = value
- 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.
SEE ALSO¶
recollindex(1) recoll(1)