Beagle

Indexing Data

The Beagle daemon performs all indexing automatically. Please see the installing Beagle page for instructions on setting up the Beagle daemon.

By default, everything in your home directory gets indexed.

You can use beagle-settings, a GUI frontend to the configuration system, to exclude directories (and all of its children) from being indexed. There is also a command line utility called beagle-config which works just as well (use the AddRoot option of the indexing section). In both cases wildcards are allowed.

Once you've got the Beagle daemon running, there are a few other things you might want to set up. They can be found at the optional prerequisites page. Make sure to re-compile Beagle after installing a new optional package.

Beagle is smart about how it determines when to index your files. It tries not to interfere with other applications you may be running. But if you want to force it to index everything as fast as possible, before running Beagle:

$ export BEAGLE_EXERCISE_THE_DOG=1

However, this will slow down your system considerably as Beagle reads data from the hard drive and uses the CPU to index it.

Static Index

Beagle can help you create static indexes to index and search data that doesn't require or allow indexing in real time, for example NFS or other remote filesystems or some repository that doesn't change very often. See Static Indexes for information about it.

Note that by default, Beagle will create useful system-wide static indexes for files on your system (e.g.: files in /usr/share/doc). These indexes will be automatically used by beagled when found. More on this mechanism on the Beagle Crawl System page.

Tools

Beagle includes a few command-line tools that allow you to see the current status of your indexes. The beagle-index-info tool shows you how many documents have been indexed. The beagle-status tool shows you the current work the daemon is doing, on an ongoing basis.

IMAP Folders

It is worth noting that beagle _WILL NOT_ index the content of your IMAP e-mails unless your mail client is configured to download the messages for offline viewing. To do this in evolution, right click on an IMAP folder and select 'Preferences'. Then check the 'download content for offline viewing' checkbox.