Perlfect Search 3.31 README documentation

Table of Contents

• License
• Requirements
• Installation
• Indexing your site
• Putting a search box on your pages
• Customizing the results page
• Highlighting matched terms
• Excluding directories or files from the index
• Searching
• Find out more

License

Requirements

• A webserver that lets you execute CGI scripts (check with your web hosting provider if you are unsure)
• Perl 5.004 or higher
• DB_File 1.72 module (Source/ActiveState Perl) -- before you download it, try if Perlfect Search works without. DB_File may already be installed by default.
• The following modules are only necessary if you want to fetch the pages you want to index via http. Note that some or all modules may already be installed on your system, so you should first try if it works without installation. If you are on Windows and you are using ActivateState Perl you can install missing modules with PPM: type ppm, then install <package_name>. Otherwise download the sources linked here (the version number is the minimum version, more recent versions should work, too):
  • MIME::Base64 2.11
  • Digest::MD5 2.20
  • URI 1.10
  • HTML::Tagset 3.03
  • HTML::Parser 3.15
  • LWP::libwww-perl 5.50
  If you have never before installed a Perl module you may want to read How to install modules (or, alternatively, Installing CPAN Modules).

Installation

1. Open the compressed archive you downloaded with a suitable compression tool (e.g. tar and gunzip for Linux/Unix, Winzip for Windows). A directory search-3.31 will be created with all the program files in it.
2. Upload the directory to your account if it is hosted on a remote machine using FTP or scp (secure copy). Don't upload it inside your cgi-bin directory, rather put it in a temporary place. The setup utility will take care of copying everything in appropriate locations.
3. Login to your account using ssh/telnet if it is on a remote system.
4. Go inside the distribution directory that you just uploaded.
5. Run the setup utility with the following command: perl setup.pl
6. The setup utility will then guide you through the rest of the installation process.
7. Go to the installation directory (e.g. cgi-bin/perlfect/search) and try to run perl indexer.pl.
8. When everything works, you can delete the temporary search-3.31 directory.

Indexing your site

Indexing using ssh/telnet

1. Login to your account using ssh/telnet if it is on a remote machine.
2. Go to the directory where the script was installed. The setup utility will have installed the script in a directory perlfect/search/ inside your cgi-bin directory.
3. Run the indexer program with the command: perl indexer.pl and wait until it's finished.

Indexing using a web browser

Putting a search box on your pages

      <form method="get" action="/cgi-bin/perlfect/search/search.pl">
      <input type="hidden" name="p" value="1">
      <input type="hidden" name="lang" value="en">
      <input type="hidden" name="include" value="">
      <input type="hidden" name="exclude" value="">
      <input type="hidden" name="penalty" value="0">
      <select name="mode">
      <option value="all">Match ALL words</option>
      <option value="any">Match ANY word</option>
      </select>
      <input type="text" name="q"><input type="submit" value="Search">
      </form>
    

p

This is an internal variable (for the current page), you should not change it.

lang

Use this attribute to set the language of the result page. The text strings for new laguages and the paths to the templates have to be added to conf.pl.

include

If you only want to search a part of all indexed files, you can limit the search to certain paths with this option. Example: /archive/ will exclude all files except those whose pathnames match "/archive/". You can also set a regular expression. Setting this to "" will search all files. Note: Do not use this to protect private files (see below).

exclude

If you want to exclude the files in certain paths, use this option. Example: /old_stuff/. This is evaluated after include, so you can restrict the set of files with include and then further restrict it with this option. You can also set a regular expression. Setting this to "" will not exclude any files. Note: Do not use this to protect private files, as anybody can change this option. To protect private/secret files, use conf/no_index.txt instead and re-index your files.

penalty

You can decrease the ranking of old documents with this option, i.e. they will appear more at the end of all matches. This may be useful for mailing list archives, where new articles are often more interesting. The value is a float number that sets the decrease in percent per age in days. Example: with 0.5 a 100 days old document's ranking will be decreased by 50%. (Note that the calculation does not use the percentages you see in the result pages.) Even if a document's ranking is decreased to 0%, it will still appear as a match. Your server should send a Last-modified header if you want to use this option and you index your pages via http. If it doesn't, the pages without this header will be regarded as very new (their date is "now"). Often dynamically generated page lack the Last-modified header, but it depends on the contents of the page if it makes sense to regard the page as up-to-date.

mode

Set the default operator to all (logical AND) or any (logical OR). This sets how terms are connected if more than one term is entered by the user. It's just a default, users can still use +/- in front of their terms. If you don't want your users to see the selection, just make it a hidden field.

q

This is the name of the search field.

Customizing the results page

Highlighting matched terms

• Attribute values may not contain < or >, e.g. <img src="..." alt="<b>Picture</b>"> is forbidden
• <script> and <style> sections need to be commented out. Example how to comment out <script>:

            <script>
            <!--
            here comes the javascript
            // -->
            </script>

Excluding directories or files from the index

Local filesystem

/dir1/dir2/file.*

/dir1/dir_to_exclude/*
    

Files fetched via http

Searching

Find out more