Extension talk:Lucene-search/LQT Archive 1

Error when editing pages
I followed your tutorial and installed LuceneSearch. All went fine, but when I edit a page, I get this error:

Fatal error: Call to undefined method LuceneSearch::setLimitOffset in /path/to/wiki/includes/SearchEngine.php on line 222

I'm using Mediawiki 1.10.0. Is this a known problem or just a configuration issue? Looks like LuceneSearch.php or LuceneSearch_body.php don't define that function at all. Same with LuceneSearch::update function...


 * You're missing

$wgDisableSearchUpdate = true;
 * in your LocalSettings.php. It should be placed before the require_once statement. --Rainman 17:48, 12 July 2007 (UTC)

Installing Lucene on Windows 2003 Server
Is there a way to install the LuceneSearch under Windows? I Run my wiki on a Windows 2003 Server with XAMPP and I want to use the features of Lucene. I found at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Installing_lucene_search that wikipedia uses the C# engine of Lucene.

Is there a compiled version of the C# engine to install it on my Apache running on Windows 2003 Server?----stp-- 13:40, 1 August 2007 (UTC)


 * As far as I know, no. --Rainman 09:54, 3 August 2007 (UTC)

I am also interested in a Windows 2003 tutorial for improving MediaWiki search results. Cedarrapidsboy 14:29, 2 August 2007 (UTC)


 * You can use the old C# daemon following tutorial on Installing lucene search. Wikimedia sites used to use this one, but now use to the latest (java) version. The new version could in principle run on windows with some modifications (main problem is usage of symbolic and hard links), but there is no-one around the patch it. --Rainman 09:54, 3 August 2007 (UTC)

RE: Installing Lucene on Windows 2003 Server --jdpond 21:53, 27 August 2007 (UTC)
There is a .dll version available here: http://incubator.apache.org/lucene.net/download/, but I don't know if this helps
 * The problem is not in the lucene itself, but the LSearch daemon, that makes use of linux fs to efficiently fetch new indexes, keep old copies, and swap copies after a background warmup phrase. --Rainman 09:18, 28 August 2007 (UTC)

Missing Method?
I installed everything following the instructions (on MediaWiki 1.10.1), but I'm getting this when I hit the search-button:

Fatal error: Call to undefined method LuceneSearch::getRedirect in /var/www/mediawiki-1.10.1/includes/SpecialPage.php on line 396

Is this a known issue with 1.10.1, or am I missing something? --217.6.3.114 06:34, 6 August 2007 (UTC)


 * No idea, getRedirect is defined in SpecialPage, and LuceneSearch inherits SpecialPage. You might be using some odd php version, or something else might be wrong... --Rainman 10:55, 6 August 2007 (UTC)


 * My PHP- Version is (PHP 5.2.0-8+etch7 (cli) (built: Jul 2 2007 21:46:15)). Do you really think this might be a problem? I believe it is more likely that I forgot something obvious, not mentioned in the instructions. For example: I had to download ExtensionFunctions.php from svn, because it is not shipped with Mediawiki or the Extension. Do I need to register the Extension anywhere other than in LocalSettings.php? --217.6.3.114 12:55, 6 August 2007 (UTC)
 * I've seen people complain about various mediawiki stuff not working with php 5.2, switching back to php 5.1 usually fixes it. But I'm by no means php expert (I mainly do the java part), so I cannot really tell if it would help. If you can, give it a try, and let us know if it helps. --Rainman 16:48, 6 August 2007 (UTC)


 * There seems to be no php 5.1 package available for debian etch, so I guess there's no chance to make search work.--217.6.3.114 12:10, 7 August 2007 (UTC)
 * I submitted a bugreport: http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=10835
 * Yep, seen it .. I still think it might be a php problem, or maybe a broken eAccelerator or something like that... --Rainman 10:33, 21 August 2007 (UTC)
 * Is eAccelerator required for this extension? We do not use it.--217.6.3.114 08:58, 7 September 2007 (UTC)
 * Found the Solution! The problem was incompatibility between the MWSearch-Extension and LuceneSearch. I forgot that MWSearch was still active when I installed LuceneSearch. After deactivating MWSearch the problem was gone. --217.6.3.114 08:05, 11 September 2007 (UTC)

Wildcard Search
Is there a way to use wildcards as described on http://lucene.apache.org/java/docs/queryparsersyntax.html#Wildcard%20Searches? --217.6.3.114 12:50, 12 September 2007 (UTC)


 * Yes. Currently only simple prefixes work (e.g. test*) since I didn't get to test the performance impact of other wildcard schemes. If you want to patch it yourself, look at WikiQueryParser.java around line 669 (function makeQueryFromTokens), you probably want to replace buffer[length-1]=='*' with something that checks if * or ? are anywhere in the buffer. --Rainman 16:23, 12 September 2007 (UTC)

dumpBackup.php causes DB connection error: Unknown error
Following the simple Index creation tutorial "Building the index" I tryed to run php maintenance/dumpBackup.php --current --quiet > wikidb.xml && java -cp LuceneSearch.jar org.wikimedia.lsearch.importer.Importer -s wikidb.xml wikidb But the Script throws the mentioned error. After big trouble and consideration of this script I've found a solution for this/my and our Problem. The Problem exists, because of the for dumpBackup.php required File "includes/backup.inc". This File does the main-backup-work and uses some MediaWiki-Variables($wg...). This is really no Problem, if dumpBackup.php runs with mediaWiki but as standalone console-script, it will miss this $wg..-Parameters. So dumpBackup.php uses empty strings for $wgDBtype,$wgDBadminuser,$wgDBadminpassword,$wgDBname,$wgDebugDumpSql and this causes the DB connection error: Unknown error while running. I've solved this Problem with a self-written php-wrapper-script, which only initializes this Variables and then simply include dumpBackup.php and now it works fine. This is my php-wrapper-script: <?php
 * 1) dumpBackupInit - Wrapper Script to run the mediaWiki xml-dump "dumpBackup.php" correctly
 * 2) @author: Stefan Furcht
 * 3) @version: 1.0
 * 4) @require: /srv/www/htdocs/wiki/maintenance/dumpBackup.php

$wgDBtype = 'mysql'; $wgDBadminuser="[MySQL-Username]"; $wgDBadminpassword ="[MySQL-Usernames-Password]"; $wgDBname = '[mediaWiki-Database-scheme]'; $wgDebugDumpSql='true';
 * 1) The following Variables musst be set, to get dumpBackup.php at work
 * 1) you'll find this Values in the DB-section into your mediaWiki-Config: LocalSettings.php

require_once("/srv/www/htdocs/wiki/maintenance/dumpBackup.php"); ?>
 * 1) XML-Dumper 'dumpBackup.php' requires the setted Vars to run
 * 2) simply include the original dumpBackup-Script

Now you can use this script as like as the dumpBackup.php with exception it will (hopefully) now run correctly. Example:  php dumpBackupInit.php --current > WikiDatabaseDump.xml 

I hope this will help you. Please excuse my properly bad english

Regards -Stefan-
 * dumpBackup.php uses AdminSettings.php (and not LocalSettings.php), so you need to set it up (basically you would rename AdminSettings.sample and fill-in the data). What would be in AdminSettings.php is exactly what you provide in your wrapper, see Manual:System_administration. --Rainman 16:12, 12 September 2007 (UTC)

Thank you very much. I've never read what 'AdminSettings.php' exactly does. By setting this vars, it works finde. So you can delete my "wrapper script" from this discussion page. But perhaps it's usefull to mention explicitly on the extension page that 'AdminSettings.php' musst be set to run 'dumpBackup.php', because somebody may never had to issue on this file before. Thanks for this very great extension. -Stefan- 79.211.199.66 08:14, 20 September 2007 (UTC)

lsearchd killed in virtual hosting environment
When running lsearchd in a virtual hosting environment, it would work for 10-20 seconds or so, then it would fail with the message "killed." Thanks to Rainman's help, I verified that the resource requirements of the application exceeded the capacity available in the virtual hosting environment (whether it was the size of the JVM or number of threads, I was never sure.) It runs fine and with modest resource requirements on a dedicated server. Dbkayanda 20:44, 14 October 2007 (UTC)

Also, I notice in lsearch.conf there are a number of variables for the Storage backend:


 * Storage.username
 * Storage.password

etc. Do these need to be modified to my environment, or do they get ignored?


 * These are for the incremental updater (it stores articles rank info). If you don't use it, it gets ignored. --Rainman 17:23, 15 September 2007 (UTC)

Error while initially creating index
I am trying to get the LuceneSearch-Extension running on a mediawiki-1.11.0rc1 installation under opensuse10.2. LuceneSearch.jar and mwdumper.jar were generated from svn sources with ant and javac-version 1.5.0_12. I followed the instructions, but when I try to build the index, I get a Null-pointer exception:

me@mypc:~/var/lucene> java -cp ~/bin/lucene-search-2/LuceneSearch.jar org.wikimedia.lsearch.importer.Importer -s wikidb_TEST.xml wikidb_TEST MediaWiki Lucene search indexer - index builder from xml database dumps. Trying config file at path /home/muenzebrock/.lsearch.conf 0   [main] INFO  org.wikimedia.lsearch.util.UnicodeDecomposer  - Loaded unicode decomposer 8   [main] INFO  org.wikimedia.lsearch.ranks.RankBuilder  - First pass, getting a list of valid articles... 324 pages (1.213,483/sec), 324 revs (1.213,483/sec) 316 [main] INFO  org.wikimedia.lsearch.ranks.RankBuilder  - Second pass, calculating article links... 375 [main] INFO  org.wikimedia.lsearch.util.Localization  - Reading localization for En 377  [main] WARN  org.wikimedia.lsearch.util.Localization  - Error processing message file at file:///srv/www/htdocs/php/mediawiki1.11.0rc1/languages/messages/MessagesEn.php 378 [main] WARN  org.wikimedia.lsearch.util.Localization  - Could not load localization for En 324 pages (2.677,686/sec), 324 revs (2.677,686/sec) 465 [main] INFO  org.wikimedia.lsearch.importer.Importer  - Third pass, indexing articles... Exception in thread "main" java.lang.NullPointerException at java.io.File. (File.java:194) at org.apache.lucene.store.FSDirectory.getDirectory(FSDirectory.java:117) at org.apache.lucene.index.IndexWriter. (IndexWriter.java:204) at org.wikimedia.lsearch.importer.SimpleIndexWriter.openIndex(SimpleIndexWriter.java:67) at org.wikimedia.lsearch.importer.SimpleIndexWriter. (SimpleIndexWriter.java:49) at org.wikimedia.lsearch.importer.DumpImporter. (DumpImporter.java:39) at org.wikimedia.lsearch.importer.Importer.main(Importer.java:128)

I played with the Indexes.path-variable in lsearch.conf, but with no luck.
 * Do you have permissions to write to directory you set as Indexes.path in /home/muenzebrock/.lsearch.conf ? --Rainman 14:13, 19 September 2007 (UTC)
 * Yes. For debugging, I set it to be world-writable. --205.175.225.24 14:20, 19 September 2007 (UTC)
 * You can do imports only at the indexer, so, did you set your lsearch-global.conf right? i.e. assign the index wikidb_TEST to your host mypc (not localhost or 127.0.0.1) in the Index section? --Rainman 14:47, 19 September 2007 (UTC)
 * This is the part of lsearch-global.conf that I touched (i.e. the rest is similar to the file in svn):

[Database] wikidb_TEST : (single) (language,de) (warmup,100) [Search-Group] oblak : wikidb_TEST [Index] oblak : wikidb_TEST
 * 1) databases can be writen as {url}, where url contains list of dbs
 * 1) wikilucene : (single) (language,en) (warmup,0)
 * 2) wikidev : (single) (language,sr)
 * 3) wikilucene : (nssplit,3) (nspart1,[0]) (nspart2,[4,5,12,13]), (nspart3,[])
 * 4) wikilucene : (language,en) (warmup,10)
 * 1) Search groups
 * 2) Index parts of a split index are always taken from the node's group
 * 3) host : db1.part db2.part
 * 4) Mulitple hosts can search multiple dbs (N-N mapping)
 * 1) oblak : wikilucene wikidev
 * 1) Index nodes
 * 2) host: db1.part db2.part
 * 3) Each db.part can be indexed by only one host
 * 1) oblak: wikilucene wikidev


 * Now I seem to recognize my failure: I should have replaced oblak with my hostname, right? I was wondering what this should mean anyway ;-) Thanks for your quick help on this. --205.175.225.24 15:00, 19 September 2007 (UTC)

Multiple wikis in one database
Is there a way to index and search multiple wikis that are contained within one database? I've tried a few things in the configuration and command lines, and I've not figured out a way to do this.

Thanks! --Laduncan 16:31, 8 October 2007 (UTC)


 * If you want to get search results combined from multiple wikis, that is still not supported (as of v2.0). Next minor release might show some improvements in that direction.. --Rainman 16:55, 8 October 2007 (UTC)


 * Thanks for the quick info! --Laduncan 20:31, 8 October 2007 (UTC)

Requiring less exact matches
It appears that the search in the fulltext is doing an implicit AND -- that is, all the words need to be in the document for it to appear in the results list.

For what I'm doing, I'd like to have the default be "OR," and let the ranking algorithm hopefully bring the most relevant content to the top. (The queries my users will be using will be long and complex, and will generally match nothing with "AND.")

I can manually search with OR between the words, but I wanted to know if I could change the configuration of the extension to have it do that by default.

Thanks in advance, Dbkayanda 00:57, 15 October 2007 (UTC)


 * Personally, I think ranking is not smart enough to give best results if the default operator is OR, but you can change it with hacking the code a bit. In WikiQueryParser.java, on line 112 there is:, replace the last part with  . --Rainman 14:41, 15 October 2007 (UTC)


 * Worked like a charm. Thanks, as always, for your help.

Index of attachments (doc, pdf, xls)
Hi Robert,

I found the cool mediawiki extension for the lucene search engine. Is there a possibility to index all attachments like PDF, HTML, DOC and XLS with this addon?

I found some informations in the lucene faq - http://wiki.apache.org/lucene-java/LuceneFAQ#head-37523379241b88fd90bcd1de81b74e7ec8843f72 - how to index attachments. Is it able to use such indexed files with the mediawiki extension you wrote?

Thanks a lot! Alex--14:51, 22 October 2007 (UTC)


 * Yes, there are libraries that can parse pdf, doc,.. that work with lucene, but I haven't got around to include them in the extension yet, and I probably won't have time in next few months ... If you really need it, you can try to hack it yourself, you would probably want Importer to fetch the media file (maybe with ?action=raw), and then construct an Article object whose contents would be the parsed text and pass it to the indexer. --Rainman 21:08, 22 October 2007 (UTC)


 * Were all namespaces indexed in the current LuceneSearch extension? Also the namespace image that contains all file-data? Does the extension then only index the recent file description? Where I have to start in the LuceneSearch_body.php ?

Thanks! Alex --12:06, 23 October 2007 (UTC)

All articles from the database get indexed. LuceneSearch_body.php is just an interface for the java daemon that does all the work. So, you'll need to modify the java code. What currently gets indexed is just the image descriptions, the media files themself are stored outside the database, in the file system... --Rainman 10:20, 23 October 2007 (UTC)