A Recoll Firefox Extension

This project supports a Firefox extension that provides the capability to include the web pages visited in the Firefox browser in the text search index of the Recoll text search tool. These web pages will then be returned as part of the results of searches performed with Recoll.

Recoll is a desktop text search tool for Linux created by Jean-Francois Dockès. Recoll has, for some time now, supported the use of a Firefox extension originally created for the Beagle desktop search engine, taking over and consuming the output of that extension to index web pages visited in Firefox. A problem arose when that Beagle extension stopped working with the more recent releases of Firefox. Compounding that problem is the fact that Beagle itself has disappeared from the web, leaving us without support for its associated Firefox extension. This Recoll extension then is an attempt to address these problems. It takes Toa Fei’s original Beagle extension and updates it to work with Recoll and the latest Firefox browsers. It also makes cosmetic changes to brand the extension as a Recoll-specific extension.

Installation:

1. If you already have the Beagle extension installed, go to the Tools->Add Ons page in Firefox and remove it.
2. Install the recoll-firefox-extension XPI file by clicking the download button below. Firefox should prompt you to allow the installation of the extension after you click this button. If it does not do so, then simply download the XPI file to your computer and drag-n-drop it on the Add Ons page in Firefox (Tools->Add Ons). You will be required to restart Firefox in order to complete the installation of the Recoll extension.
   Download Recoll Firefox Extension
3. Add the line “beaglequeuedir = /home/ME/.recollweb/ToIndex” (no trailing slash please) to your recoll.conf file: default location /home/ME/.recoll/recoll.conf. This is the directory where the extension will queue up web page content for indexing and recollindex needs to be told to look there for that. (Note that /home/ME refers to your home directory, whatever that may be. You should use that directory name here.)
4. After restarting Firefox, please notice the Recoll indexing icon that appears in the Firefox status bar. Hover your mouse over the icon to see if automatic web page indexing is active. If automatic indexing is not active, click the icon to make it so. Right clicking the icon provides a menu that allows you to do on-demand indexing of web pages or to adjust the extension’s properties. These same options are also available from the context menu when you right click in the middle of a web page.

Support:

There is no formal support for this code. I will provide "best-effort" support in as far as my real life will allow. I use the discussion forum and the bug tracking system here on SourceForge for these purposes. Please make use of them if you have problems or questions.

Licensing:

This code is licensed under the terms of the GNU GPL v3 license.