A more complete version of this document can be found at http://www.recoll.org


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Installing Recoll

  Building from source

    Prerequisites

   At the very least, you will need to download and install the xapian core
   package (I am currently using xapian version 0.9.2), and the qt runtime
   and development packages (I am currently using qt 3.3.3).

   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.

   You also need libiconv. I am currently using version 1.9. The iconv
   interface is part of libc on Linux systems, you shouldn't need to do
   anything there.

   External file types: recoll uses external applications to index some file
   types. You need to install them for the file types that you wish to have
   indexed:

     * MS Word documents: antiword.
     * PDF files: pdftotext is part of the Xpdf package.
     * Postscript files: pstotext.
     * RTF files: the filter uses unrtf

    Building

   Recoll has been built on Linux (redhat7.3, mandriva 2005), FreeBSD and
   Solaris 8. If you build on another system, I would very much welcome
   patches.

   Normal procedure:

     * cd recoll-xxx
     * configure
     * make
     * (practise your usual hardship-repelling invocations).

   There little autoconfiguration. 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).

  Using binary packages

   The binary versions 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). However, this
   also means that you can't change the versions of xapian and iconv which
   are used.

   After extracting the tar file, you can proceed with installation as if you
   had built the package from source.

  Installation

    Commands and common files

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

    Personal configuration

   The personal configuration files and the database are kept in the .recoll
   directory in your home. If this directory does not exist when recoll or
   recollindex are started, the directory will be created and the sample
   configuration files will be copied. recoll will give you a chance to edit
   the configuration file before starting indexation. recollindex will
   proceed immediately.

  Configuration

   Recoll uses text configuration files. You will have to edit them by hand
   for now (there is still some hope for a GUI configuration tool in the
   future).

   The main configuration file is named ~/.recoll/recoll.conf.

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

   You are then ready to try a query, see the user manual for more detail.

   Depending on what is installed on your system, you may also want to adjust
   the external viewers defined in ~/.recoll/mimeconf (ie: html is either
   previewed internally or displayed using firefox, but you may prefer
   mozilla...). Look for the [view] section.