box.matto.nl
Enjoying Open Source Software

Posted:

Install minimal Recoll on FreeBSD 15

Recoll is a full text search application. Recoll is based on the very capable Xapian search engine library.

The FreeBSD package comes with a ton of dependencies, which is great for use on your desktop, but can be a bit of overkill for non-graphical systems.

Minimal install

The idea is to install with as minimal dependencies as possible and start working with that. Later we can always add more.

Install dependencies

Although we install Recoll from source, we install the dependencies as FreeBSD package.

To make it easy to copy the install to other systems, we make use of GNU stow, so we install that too.

pkg install libX11 libxslt pkgconf stow xapian-core

Prepare installation directory

mkdir -p /usr/local/stow/recoll

Download source files

Version 1.37.5 is unfortunately the last version with autotools build, so we fetch that:

fetch https://www.recoll.org/recoll-1.37.5.tar.gz

Configure and build

./configure \
    --enable-idxthreads \
    --disable-qtgui \
    --enable-recollq \
    --disable-python-module \
    --without-aspell \
    --disable-python-aspell \
    --disable-python-chm  \
    --prefix=/usr/local/stow/recoll

make
make install

Install

cd /usr/local/stow
stow recoll

Configuration files

To test our install, we create a simple configuration file ~/.recoll/recoll.conf:

followLinks = 1

topdirs = /usr/local/share/man \
  /usr/local/share/info

This configuration file aims to index the system documentation files.

For this, we also need a mimemap file ~/.recoll/mimemap:

.0p = text/x-man
.1 = text/x-man
.3 = text/x-man
.7 = text/x-man
.8 = text/x-man

This is for the standard man pages, if you have more directories under /usr/local/share/man/ add those extensions too.

Install helper applications

In order to make sense of the files, Xapian needs some helper programs.

Our system documentation consists of man pages and info files, so we need the helper applications for those two:

pkg install groff texinfo

For some reason, we need to make the indexer understand that "python3" is in fact pyhton3.11.

We can create an alias (depending on your shell), or otherwise create a symlink:

ln -s /usr/local/bin/python3.11 /usr/local/bin/python3

Create index

Next, create or update the index:

recollindex

Start searching

After our man pages are indexed, we can search for text:

recollq -q 'expansion'

recollq -A 'expansion escape sequences textdomain'

Of course, we don't get the nicely formatted output as with the graphical Recoll desktop application.

Kudos

Thanks to Sergey Matveev for help with the configuration!

Tags:

⇽ Books of March 2026 Explore the smol web with Bubbles ⇾

Webrings

netizen-ring-button

<<- random ->>

100% made with ♥ by a human — no cookies, no trackers.
Proud member of the 250kb.club, the no-JS.club, the Blogroll.Club, and the Bukmark.Club.
Don’t let a billionaire’s algorithm control what you read — use an RSS feed reader.