Special suffixes

Manticore Search supports special suffixes which makes it easier to use numeric values with a special meaning. The common form for them is integer number+literal, like 10k or 100d, but not 40.3s(since 40.3 is not integer), and not 2d 4h (since there are two, not one value). Literals are case-insensitive, so 10W is the same as 10w. There are 2 types of such suffixes currently supported:

  • Size suffixes: can be used in settings that define size of something: memory buffer, disk file size, limit of RAM etc. If you don’t specify any suffix the value is considered in bytes by default. The suffixes can be:
    • k for kilobytes (1k=1024)
    • m for megabytes (1m=1024k)
    • g for gigabytes (1g=1024m)
    • t for terabytes (1t=1024g)
  • Time suffixes: can be used in settings defining some time interval values: delays, timeouts etc. “Naked” values for those parameters usually have documented scale, e.g. for some settings 100 means 100 seconds, for others - 100 milliseconds. However, instead of guessing you can just use an explicit suffix. Those can be:
    • us for useconds (microseconds)
    • ms for milliseconds
    • s for seconds
    • m for minutes
    • h for hours
    • d for days
    • w for weeks.

Scripted configuration

Manticore configuration supports shebang syntax, meaning that the configuration can be written in a programming language and interpreted at loading, allowing dynamic settings.

For example, tables can be generated by querying a database table, various settings can be modified depending on external factors or external files can be included (which contain tables and/sources).

The configuration file is parsed by declared declared interpreter and the output is used as the actual configuration. This is happening each time the configuration is read (not only at searchd startup).

This facility is not available on Windows platform.

In the following example, we are using PHP to create multiple tables with different name and we also scan a specific folder for file containing extra declarations of tables.

  1. #!/usr/bin/php
  2. ...
  3. <?php for ($i=1; $i<=6; $i++) { ?>
  4. table test_<?=$i?> {
  5.   type = rt
  6.   path = /var/lib/manticore/data/test_<?=$i?>
  7.   rt_field = subject
  8.   ...
  9.  }
  10.  <?php } ?>
  11.  ...
  13.  <?php
  14.  $confd_folder='/etc/manticore.conf.d/';
  15.  $files = scandir($confd_folder);
  16.  foreach($files as $file)
  17.  {
  18.          if(($file == '.') || ($file =='..'))
  19.          {} else {
  20.                  $fp = new SplFileInfo($confd_folder.$file);
  21.                  if('conf' == $fp->getExtension()){
  22.                          include ($confd_folder.$file);
  23.                  }
  24.          }
  25.  }
  26.  ?>

Comments

The configuration file supports comments, with # character used as start comment section. The comment character can be present at the start of the line or inline.

Extra care should be considered when using # in character tokenization settings as everything after it will not be taken into consideration. To avoid this, use # UTF-8 which is U+23.

# can also be escaped using \. Escaping is required if # is present in database credential in source declarations.