Joomla User Manual

Automatic Indexing¶

Although the Smart Search index is automatically kept up-to-date whenever content items are amended, there are some circumstances where you need to re-run the Indexer. You can do this manually using the Index toolbar button in the Smart Search: Indexed Content page. However if you need to re-index content automatically then it is also possible to run the Indexer from the command line interface. This makes it particularly convenient to run the Indexer from a cron job.

From the cli directory the command line is:

php joomla.php finder:index

Typical output from the command line Indexer looks like this:

    Smart Search INDEXER
    ============================

    Starting Indexer
    Setting up Finder plugins
    Setup 154 items in 0.094 seconds.
     * Processed batch 1 in 0.213 seconds.
     * Processed batch 2 in 0.182 seconds.
     * Processed batch 3 in 0.177 seconds.
     * Processed batch 4 in 0.009 seconds.
    Total Processing Time: 0.676 seconds.

Purging Before Indexing¶

Ordinarily, running the Indexer will do an incremental update of the index. That is, it will only update the index for those content items that have changed since the index was last updated. It will not remove any items from prior indexing that came from plugins that were uninstalled. So, if you need to completely clear all the existing index entries before completely rebuilding the index, then you need to do a "purge and then index" operation. To do that you can add the -- purge argument to the command line, like this

php joomla.php finder:index -- purge

Note that this will attempt to preserve any static filters you may have set up, whereas selecting Maintenance→Clear Index in the Administrator toolbar will not preserve your static filters.

Setting Up a cron Job¶

Whilst the specifics are beyond the scope of this article, in general you will merely have to enter the above command into the cron job manager and specify the time or times at which the job is to be run. You will probably need to include the full path to the indexer. For example, like this

php /var/www/myjoomla/cli/joomla.php finder:index -- purge

It may also be necessary to specify the full path to the php command, such as /usr/local/opt/php@8.2/bin/php.

Out of Memory Issues¶

If your site has particularly complex indexing requirements it is possible that the standard memory allocation will not be sufficient for the indexer to run to completion. You can increase the memory allocated to the command-line indexer using an extra parameter on the command-line, like this:

php -d memory_limit=256M joomla.php finder:index

Replace the 256M with whatever is appropriate for your circumstances.

The command line Indexer uses the same parameters as the Indexer in the Smart Search: Indexed Content page. You can change the parameters using the Options toolbar button on that page. Note that both the Indexer Batch Size and Memory Table Limit fields affect the amount of memory used by the indexer.