RECOLL.CONF(5)

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)