Indexing with SWISH-E

The next step described in the README file is to copy the swish-e binary to a suitable location (like /usr/local/bin, a standard location for binary programs that you want to make available to every user on the server). The problem with that is, we will probably need root privileges on the server to write to that directory. What if we don’t?

If we don’t, we can just go ahead and stick the swish-e binary somewhere else. One obvious place to put it would be in a personal bin directory under our home directory. Just to keep things really simple, for this example we’re going to stick it in the actual directory on the web server where the search CGI script is going to go. In this example, that directory turns out to be /w2/s/www.socalsail.com/html/search, which corresponds to the directory referenced by http://www.socalsail.com/search from the web server’s perspective.

Besides copying the swish-e binary from the src directory to our search directory, we also need to copy the user.config file and edit it to reflect the parameters we want swish-e to use when creating its index of our site. This is different from the config.h header file we looked at a moment ago. That file told the make program some things it needed to know when creating the swish-e binary, which we have to do only once. The modified user.config file will tell the swish-e binary what to do when it is creating its search index, which is something it will need to do whenever the content on our web ...

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