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- Dokeos Search Plugin Installation Guide
- =======================================
- 1. Introduction
- ---------------
- This search plugin is composed of everything you need to get up and
- running with a full-text search feature on your Dokeos portal. However,
- this installation is not easy, and if you are not familiar with the
- term "indexing", or with the configuration of a Linux server, we
- highly recommend you seek advice from a qualified system administrator
- to help you doing this. Of course, the Dokeos company, for which I am
- directly working, offers this kind of services. Feel free to contact
- info@dokeos.com for a quote.
- This search plugin relies on a search server, called MnogoSearch, which
- has to be installed independently on a Linux server (the Windows
- version, sadly, is not GPL nor free to use).
- The following installation guides you through the steps of installing
- the server on a Debian or Ubuntu computer, but you might probably
- succeed in installing it on other architectures.
- Dokeos has made considerable efforts to have MnogoSearch integrated
- into the latest versions of PHP, but it would never have succeeded
- without the help of pierre.php@gmail.com who did all the technical
- work.
- 2. Installing files
- --------------------
- All the "conf" files and the "search.xml.php" file in this package
- need to be revised to configure properly. Most of all, you should look
- for a "DBAddr mysql://db_user:db_pass@db_host/db_name/?dbmode=single"
- line in the server files to make sure it is using the correct database
- credentials.
- Now you will see that there are two directories in this plugin.
- The "client" directory needs to stay there. The "client/www" directory
- contains a PHP script that needs to be copied at the root of your
- Dokeos portal (this will later give the indexing server an access to
- your Dokeos portal).
- The "server" directory has to be moved on the indexing server (which
- might be the same as your Dokeos portal's server if it is not too
- overloaded).
- This "server" directory contains three subdirectories.
- The "server/etc" directory contains the configuration of the
- mnogosearch server, which typically on Debian will be located in
- /etc/mnogosearch. Once you have installed the mnogosearch server,
- you can pretty much overwrite the configuration with the files
- contained in "server/etc", as they are already customised for indexing
- Dokeos.
- The "server/cron.d" directory contains an optional file that you might
- want to put in /etc/cron.d, so that the indexing will be run every night
- 5.00am.
- The "server/www" directory contains files that should be made available
- to the public, to access idexation results. Feel free to put these, for
- example, in /var/www/mnogosearch on your indexing server if that's where
- Apache takes its public files.
- 3. Installing the search server (MnoGoSearch)
- ---------------------------------------------
- The mnogosearch server installation comes in two parts:
- A) installing the mnogosearch indexing server itself. This can be done
- with a simple:
- sudo apt-get install mnogosearch-common mnogosearch-mysql
- B) installing the PHP5-mnogosearch bindings. This can be done by using
- the PECL command-line installer
- sudo pecl install mnogosearch-1.0.0
- Once the server is installed, you may need to install server specific
- additional programs to allow your indexer to go into documents (PDF,
- Word, Excel, etc) and index the contents of these documents as well.
- You can find a list of programs supposed to be there in the
- server/etc/indexer.conf file. Search for "pdftotext" and you will find
- the lines nearby all define a program used to translate a document
- into pure text before indexing it. Make sure you are able to launch
- all of these commands on the command line. If you can't, the indexing
- server is not likely to be able to do it either...
- 4. Creating the DB and Dokeos user
- ----------------------------------
- In order to keep the index data, mnogosearch requires a database to
- store this data. It is recommended to create an alternative user, with
- access to only one database to do this.
- Once this user is configured and the DBAddr line is configured in
- server/etc/indexer.conf, you can create the database structure by
- calling (on the indexing server):
- indexer -Ecreate indexer.conf
- The next step is to create a Dokeos user for the purpose of indexing
- your courses (the user needs access to all courses to be able to index
- them). Create a simple user in the Dokeos administration interface. Then
- get his ID (you can get it by hovering the edition icon in the users
- list: the user id is the number that shows after "user_id" in the URL)
- and use it inside indexer_login.php to replace the 'xxx' value.
- Also configure the IP address and the host name of the indexing server
- inside this file.
- Once these two steps are complete, you can start the first indexation
- of your portal, by calling, on the command line of your indexing server:
- indexer -N10 index.conf
- N10 lets you limit the number of simultaneous threads that your indexing
- server will be allowed to use. More than 10 might put your Dokeos portal
- in overload. You might want to reduce this number to 3 for light servers.
- 5. Installing the plugin
- ------------------------
- Installing the plugin is done by dispatching the files contained in
- this plugin as described in "2. Installing files", and configuring the
- various *.conf.php files as well as server/etc/indexer.conf and
- server/www/search.xml.php
- Once the files have been moved and configured, you will still need to
- index some data, then activate the plugin inside the Dokeos
- administration panel. Then, basically, you should be able to use
- the plugin straight away.
- 6. International use
- --------------------
- To keep this plugin small, we had to remove a considerable amount of
- international-parsing helper files. If you need one for your language,
- it may well be included in the default installation file for the
- Debian mnogosearch-common package.
- If not, you should check more recent versions of mnogosearch on its
- website: http://www.mnogosearch.org/
- 7. Seek help
- ------------
- Commercial suppport is available for the configuration and remote use
- of this plugin at info@dokeos.com
- If you have plenty of time to learn it by yourself or any other reason,
- you might find some free help on our forums: http://www.dokeos.com/forum
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