public-inbox-extindex(1)

public-inbox-extindex1

Create and update external search indices

Usage

public-inbox-extindex [OPTIONS] EXTINDEX_DIR INBOX_DIR ...

public-inbox-extindex [OPTIONS] [EXTINDEX_DIR] --all

Overview

public-inbox-extindex creates and updates an external search and overview database used by the read-only public-inbox PSGI (HTTP), NNTP, and IMAP interfaces. This requires either the Search::Xapian XS bindings OR the Xapian SWIG bindings, along with DBD::SQLite and DBI Perl modules.

Options

-j JOBS
--jobs=JOBS
--no-fsync
--dangerous
--rethread
--max-size SIZE
--batch-size SIZE

These switches behave as they do for public-inbox-index(1)

--all

Index all "publicinbox" entries in "PI_CONFIG".

"publicinbox" entries indexed by "public-inbox-extindex" can have full Xapian searching abilities with the per-"publicinbox" "indexlevel" set to "basic" and their respective Xapian ("xap15" or "xapian15") directories removed. For multiple public-inboxes where cross-posting is common, this allows significant space savings on Xapian indices.

--gc

Perform garbage collection instead of indexing. Use this if inboxes are removed from the extindex, or if messages are purged or removed from some inboxes.

--reindex

Forces a re-index of all messages in the extindex. This can be used for in-place upgrades and bugfixes while read-only server processes are utilizing the index. Keep in mind this roughly doubles the size of the already-large Xapian database.

The extindex locks will be released roughly every 10s to allow public-inbox-mda(1) and public-inbox-watch(1) processes to write to the extindex.

--fast

Used with "--reindex", it will only look for new and stale entries and not touch already-indexed messages.

Files

public-inbox-extindex-format(5)

Configuration

public-inbox-extindex does not currently write to the public-inbox-config(5) file, configuration may be entered manually. The extindex name of "all" is a special case which corresponds to indexing "--all" inboxes. An example for "--all" is as follows:

        [extindex "all"]
                topdir = /path/to/extindex_dir
                url = all
                coderepo = foo
                coderepo = bar

See public-inbox-config(5) for more details.

Environment

PI_CONFIG

Used to override the default "~/.public-inbox/config" value.

XAPIAN_FLUSH_THRESHOLD

The number of documents to update before committing changes to disk. This environment is handled directly by Xapian, refer to Xapian API documentation for more details.

Setting "XAPIAN_FLUSH_THRESHOLD" or "publicinbox.indexBatchSize" for a large "--reindex" may cause public-inbox-mda(1), public-inbox-learn(1) and public-inbox-watch(1) tasks to wait long and unpredictable periods of time during "--reindex".

Default: none, uses "publicinbox.indexBatchSize"

Upgrading

Occasionally, public-inbox will update it's schema version and require a full index by running this command.

Contact

Feedback welcome via plain-text mail to <mailto:[email protected]>

The mail archives are hosted at <https://public-inbox.org/meta/> and <http://4uok3hntl7oi7b4uf4rtfwefqeexfzil2w6kgk2jn5z2f764irre7byd.onion/meta/>

Releases

Unchanged in 2 releases since Debian 12 (Bookworm).

  1. 12–13

From public-inbox 1.9.0-1 in Debian 13 (Trixie). Parsed by carta from the page's man source.