INDEXTOOL(1)
π INDEXTOOL(1) β bestie edition β¨
okay so you opened the indextool man page from the Sphinxsearch family of programs and honestly? you came to the right place. buckle up π
πΈ NAME πΈ
indextool β the Sphinxsearch tool that dumps miscellaneous debug info about the physical index. it's giving "look inside the box" energy π«Ά
β¨ SYNOPSIS β¨
indextool {command} [options]
like, one command minimum, then whatever options you need. periodt π
π¦ DESCRIPTION π¦
Sphinx is a whole collection of programs that aim to provide high quality fulltext search. iconic behavior, no cap.
indextool is one of the helper tools inside the Sphinx package π. its whole job is to dump miscellaneous debug information about the physical index β like, it reads the index and tells you what's actually in there.
and bestie, the reason it's called indextool and not just indexdump is because besides dumping, it can also do index verification π₯. so it's not just a talker, it works too.
π§ COMMANDS π§
here's the full roster, no skips, no summarising, we respect every single one π:
--dumpheader FILENAME.sphβ quickly dumps the index header file you hand it, without touching any other index files or even the configuration file. the report gives you a breakdown of all the index settings, and in particular the entire attribute and field list. prior to0.9.9-rc2, this command was present in the CLI search utility (throwback fr).--dumpconfig FILENAME.sphβ dumps the index definition from the given index header file in (almost) compliantsphinx.conffile format. almost. close enough. slay.--dumpheader INDEXNAMEβ dumps the index header by index name, and it looks up the header path in the configuration file for you. convenient β¨--dumpdocids INDEXNAMEβ dumps document IDs by index name. heads up: it takes the data from the attribute (.spa) file, and therefore it requiresdocinfo=externto work. nodocinfo=extern, no docids, that's the vibe check π--dumphitlist INDEXNAME KEYWORDβ dumps all the hits (occurences) of a given keyword in a given index, with the keyword specified as text.--dumphitlist INDEXNAME --wordid IDβ same deal, dumps all the hits (occurences) of a given keyword in a given index, except here the keyword is specified as an internal numeric ID.--htmlstrip INDEXNAMEβ filtersstdinusing the HTML stripper settings for a given index, and prints the filtering results tostdout. π note that the settings will be taken fromsphinx.conf, and not the index header. important distinction, bestie.--check INDEXNAMEβ checks the index data files for consistency errors that might have been introduced either by bugs inindexerand/or hardware faults. like a health check but for your index π©Ί--strip-pathβ strips the path names from all the file names referenced from the index (stopwords, wordforms, exceptions, etc). this is useful for checking indexes built on another machine with possibly different path layouts. moving-house energy π--optimize-rt-klistsβ optimizes the kill list memory use in the disk chunk of a given RT index. that is a one-off optimization intended for rather old RT indexes, created by development versions prior to1.10-betarelease.
as of 1.10-beta releases, this kill list optimization (purging) should happen automatically, and there should never be a need to use this option. so likeβ¦ it's here, but you basically shouldn't need it π
π OPTIONS π
the only currently available option applies to all commands, and it lets you specify the configuration file:
--config CONFIGFILE,-c CONFIGFILEβ overrides the built-in config file names. that's it, that's the whole option list. short and sweet, we love a minimalist queen π
π AUTHOR π
Andrey Aksenoff (shodan@sphinxsearch.com). this manual page is written by Alexey Vinogradov (klirichek@sphinxsearch.com). permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU General Public License, Version 2 any later version published by the Free Software Foundation.
On Debian systems, the complete text of the GNU General Public License can be found in /usr/share/common-licenses/GPL. go read it if you're curious, we support the reading era π
β SEE ALSO β
indexer(1), searchd(1), search(1) β the whole friend group π«Ά
Sphinx and it's programs are documented fully by the Sphinx reference manual available in /usr/share/doc/sphinxsearch. go check it out, iykyk π
and that's the page bestie!! this was INDEXTOOL(1) from the 2.2.11-release era, dated 07/19/2016 β a classic, an icon, a legend, and honestly? it ate. now go dump some headers π
β¨π¦
π¦ where this page comes from
- nixos 26.05: sphinxsearch 2.2.11
- nixpkgs unstable: sphinxsearch 2.2.11
- π girlified by deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash on : a language model's rewrite of the original, under its terms