Miscellaneous tools

indextool

indextool is a utility tool that helps to dump various information about a physical table (excluding template or distributedtables). The general syntax for using indextool is:

indextool <command> [options]

Options effective for all commands:

  • --config <file> (-c <file> for short) overrides the built-in config file names.
  • --quiet (-q for short) keep indextool quiet - it will not output banner, etc.
  • --help (-h for short) lists all of the parameters that can be called in your particular build of indextool.
  • -v show version information of your particular build of indextool.

The commands are as follows:

  • --checkconfig just loads and verifies the config file to check if it's valid, without syntax errors.
  • --buildidf DICTFILE1 [DICTFILE2 ...] --out IDFILE build IDF file from one or several dictionary dumps. Additional parameter --skip-uniq will skip unique (df=1) words.
  • --build-infixes TABLENAME build infixes for an existing dict=keywords table (upgrades .sph, .spi in place). You can use this option for legacy table files that already use dict=keywords, but now need to support infix searching too; updating the table files with indextool may prove easier or faster than regenerating them from scratch with indexer.
  • --dumpheader FILENAME.sph quickly dumps the provided table header file without touching any other table files or even the configuration file. The report provides a breakdown of all the table settings, in particular the entire attribute and field list.
  • --dumpconfig FILENAME.sph dumps the table definition from the given table header file in (almost) compliant sphinx.conf file format.
  • --dumpheader TABLENAME dumps table header by table name with looking up the header path in the configuration file.
  • --dumpdict TABLENAME dumps dictionary. Additional -stats switch will dump to dictionary the total number of documents. It is required for dictionary files that are used for creation of IDF files.
  • --dumpdocids TABLENAME dumps document IDs by table name.
  • --dumphitlist TABLENAME KEYWORD dumps all the hits (occurrences) of a given keyword in a given table, with keyword specified as text.
  • --dumphitlist TABLENAME --wordid ID dumps all the hits (occurrences) of a given keyword in a given table, with keyword specified as internal numeric ID.
  • --docextract TBL DOCID runs usual table check pass of whole dictionary/docs/hits, and collects all the words and hits belonging to requested document. Then all of the words are placed in the order according to their fields and positions, and result is printed, grouping by field.
  • --fold TABLENAME OPTFILE This options is useful too see how actually tokenizer proceeds input. You can feed indextool with text from file if specified or from stdin otherwise. The output will contain spaces instead of separators (accordingly to your charset_table settings) and lowercased letters in words.
  • --htmlstrip TABLENAME filters stdin using HTML stripper settings for a given table, and prints the filtering results to stdout. Note that the settings will be taken from sphinx.conf, and not the table header.
  • --mergeidf NODE1.idf [NODE2.idf ...] --out GLOBAL.idf merge several .idf files into a single one. Additional parameter --skip-uniq will skip unique (df=1) words.
  • --morph TABLENAME applies morphology to the given stdin and prints the result to stdout.
  • --check TABLENAME checks the table data files for consistency errors that might be introduced either by bugs in indexer and/or hardware faults. --check also works on RT tables, RAM and disk chunks. Additional options:
    • --check-id-dups checks if there are duplicate ids
    • --check-disk-chunk CHUNK_NAME checks only specific disk chunk of an RT table. The argument is a disk chunk numeric extension of the RT table to check.
  • --strip-path strips the path names from all the file names referenced from the table (stopwords, wordforms, exceptions, etc). This is useful for checking tables built on another machine with possibly different path layouts.
  • --rotate works only with --check and defines whether to check table waiting for rotation, i.e. with .new extension. This is useful when you want to check your table before actually using it.
  • --apply-killlists loads and applies kill-lists for all tables listed in the config file. Changes are saved in .SPM files. Kill-list files (.SPK) are deleted. This can be useful if you want to move applying tables from server startup to indexing stage.

spelldump

spelldump is used to extract the contents of a dictionary file that uses the ispell or MySpell format, which can be useful in building word lists for wordforms - all of the possible forms are pre-built for you.

The general syntax is:

spelldump [options] <dictionary> <affix> [result] [locale-name]

The two main parameters are the dictionary's main file and its affix file; these are usually named [language-prefix].dict and [language-prefix].aff and can be found in most common Linux distributions and various online sources.

[result] is where the extracted dictionary data will be output, and [locale-name] specifies the locale details you wish to use.

There is also an optional -c [file] option, which specifies a file for case conversion details.

Examples of usage are:

spelldump en.dict en.aff
spelldump ru.dict ru.aff ru.txt ru_RU.CP1251
spelldump ru.dict ru.aff ru.txt .1251

The result file will contain a list of all the words in the dictionary, sorted alphabetically, in the format of a wordforms file. This can be used to tailor it to your specific needs. An example of what the result file could look like:

zone > zone
zoned > zoned
zoning > zoning

wordbreaker

wordbreaker is used to split compound words, such as those commonly found in URLs, into their component words. For example, this tool can split "lordoftherings" into its four component words, or http://manofsteel.warnerbros.com into "man of steel warner bros". This helps in searching, as it eliminates the need for prefixes or infixes. For example, searching for "sphinx" would not match "sphinxsearch", but if you break the compound word and index the separate components, you would get a match without the increased file sizes that come with using prefixes and infixes in full-text indexing.

Examples of usage include:

echo manofsteel | bin/wordbreaker -dict dict.txt split
man of steel

The input stream will be separated into words using the -dict dictionary file. If no dictionary is specified, wordbreaker looks in the working folder for a wordbreaker-dict.txt file. (The dictionary should match the language of the compound word.) The split command breaks words from the standard input and outputs the result to the standard output. There are also test and bench commands that allow you to test the splitting quality and benchmark the splitting functionality.

Wordbreaker requires a dictionary to recognize individual substrings within a string. To differentiate between different guesses, it uses the relative frequency of each word in the dictionary, with higher frequency meaning a higher split probability. You can generate such a file using the indexer tool:

indexer --buildstops dict.txt 100000 --buildfreqs myindex -c /path/to/sphinx.conf

which will write the 100,000 most frequent words along with their counts from myindex into dict.txt. The output file is a text file, so it can be edited by hand if necessary to add or remove words.

OpenAPI specification

The Manticore Search API is documented using the OpenAPI specification, which can be used to generate client SDKs. The machine-readable YAML file is available at https://raw.githubusercontent.com/manticoresoftware/openapi/master/manticore.yml

You can also view the specification visualized with the online Swagger Editor here.

Telemetry

At Manticore, we gather various anonymized metrics to enhance the quality of our products, including Manticore Search. By analyzing this data, we can not only improve the overall performance of our product but also identify which features would be most beneficial to prioritize in order to provide even more value to our users. The telemetry system operates on a separate thread in a non-blocking mode, taking snapshots and sending them once every few minutes.

We take your privacy seriously, and you can rest assured that all metrics are completely anonymous and no sensitive information is transmitted. However, if you still wish to disable telemetry, you have the option to do so by:

  • Setting the environment variable TELEMETRY=0
  • Or setting telemetry = 0 in the section searchd of your configuration file

Here is a list of all the metrics we collect:

Metric Description
collector 🏷 buddy. Indicates that this metric is collected through Manticore Buddy
os_name 🏷️ Name of the operating system
machine_id 🏷 Server identifier (the content of /etc/machine-id in Linux)
manticore_version 🏷️ Version of Manticore
columnar_version 🏷️ Version of the Columnar library if it is installed
secondary_version 🏷️ Version of the secondary library if the Columnar library is installed
buddy_version 🏷️ Version of Manticore Buddy
invocation Sent when Manticore Buddy is launched
show_queries Indicates that the show queries command was executed
backup Indicates that the backup query was executed
insert_query Indicates that the auto schema logic was executed
command_* All metrics with this prefix are sent from the show status query of the Manticore daemon
uptime The uptime of the Manticore Search daemon
workers_total The number of workers used by Manticore
cluster_* Cluster-related metrics from the show status results
table_*_count The number of tables created for each type: plain, percolate, rt, or distributed
field_count The count for each field type for tables with rt and percolate types
columnar Indicates that the Columnar library was used
columnar_field_count The number of fields that use the Columnar library

Backup metrics

The Manticore backup tool sends anonymized metrics to the Manticore metrics server by default in order to help improve the product. If you don't want to send telemetry, you can disable it by running the tool with the --disable-metric flag or by setting the environment variable TELEMETRY=0.

The following is a list of all collected metrics:

Metric Description
collector 🏷 backup. Indicates that this metric comes from the backup tool
os_name 🏷️ Name of the operating system
machine_id 🏷 Server identifier (the content of /etc/machine-id in Linux)
backup_version 🏷️ Version of the backup tool used
manticore_version 🏷️ Version of Manticore
columnar_version 🏷️ Version of Columnar library if installed
secondary_version 🏷️ Version of the secondary library if Columnar library is installed
invocation Sent when backup was initiated
failed Sent in case of failed backup
done Sent when backup/restore is successful
arg_* The arguments used to run the tool (excluding index names, etc.)
backup_store_versions_fails Indicates failure in saving Manticore version in the backup
backup_table_count Total number of backed up tables
backup_no_permissions Failed backup due to insufficient permissions to destination directory
backup_total_size Total size of the full backup
backup_time Duration of the backup
restore_searchd_running Failed to run restore process due to searchd already running
restore_no_config_file No config file found in the backup during restore
restore_time Duration of the restore
fsync_time Duration of fsync
restore_target_exists Occurs when a folder or index already exists in the destination folder for restore
terminations Indicates that the process was terminated
signal_* The signal used to terminate the process
tables Number of tables in Manticore
config_unreachable Specified configuration file does not exist
config_data_dir_missing Failed to parse data_dir from specified configuration file
config_data_dir_is_relative data_dir path in Manticore instance's configuration file is relative