How To Install recoll on Ubuntu 18.04

In this tutorial we learn how to install recoll on Ubuntu 18.04. recoll is Personal full text search package with a Qt GUI

Introduction

In this tutorial we learn how to install recoll on Ubuntu 18.04.

What is recoll

recoll is:

This package is a personal full text search package is based on a very strong backend (Xapian), for which it provides an easy to use and feature-rich interface.

Features:

  • Qt-based GUI
  • Supports the following document types (and their compressed versions)
  • Natively: text, html, OpenOffice files, maildir and mailbox (Mozilla and IceDove mail) with attachments, pidgin log files
  • With external helpers: pdf (pdftotext), postscript (ghostscript), msword (antiword), excel, ppt (catdoc), rtf (unrtf)
  • Powerful query facilities, with boolean searches, phrases, filter on file types and directory tree
  • Support for multiple charsets, Internal processing and storage uses Unicode UTF-8
  • Stemming performed at query time (can switch stemming language after indexing)
  • Easy installation. No database daemon, web server or exotic language necessary
  • An indexer which runs either as a thread inside the GUI or as an external, cron’able program

There are three methods to install recoll on Ubuntu 18.04. We can use apt-get, apt and aptitude. In the following sections we will describe each method. You can choose one of them.

Install recoll Using apt-get

Update apt database with apt-get using the following command.

sudo apt-get update

After updating apt database, We can install recoll using apt-get by running the following command:

sudo apt-get -y install recoll

Install recoll Using apt

Update apt database with apt using the following command.

sudo apt update

After updating apt database, We can install recoll using apt by running the following command:

sudo apt -y install recoll

Install recoll Using aptitude

If you want to follow this method, you might need to install aptitude first since aptitude is usually not installed by default on Ubuntu. Update apt database with aptitude using the following command.

sudo aptitude update

After updating apt database, We can install recoll using aptitude by running the following command:

sudo aptitude -y install recoll

How To Uninstall recoll on Ubuntu 18.04

To uninstall only the recoll package we can use the following command:

sudo apt-get remove recoll

Uninstall recoll And Its Dependencies

To uninstall recoll and its dependencies that are no longer needed by Ubuntu 18.04, we can use the command below:

sudo apt-get -y autoremove recoll

Remove recoll Configurations and Data

To remove recoll configuration and data from Ubuntu 18.04 we can use the following command:

sudo apt-get -y purge recoll

Remove recoll configuration, data, and all of its dependencies

We can use the following command to remove recoll configurations, data and all of its dependencies, we can use the following command:

sudo apt-get -y autoremove --purge recoll

References

Summary

In this tutorial we learn how to install recoll package on Ubuntu 18.04 using different package management tools: apt, apt-get and aptitude.