General information

If you find problems with this page, the package or its installation, please report them.

All download files are signed (gpg) and checksummed. Append .asc or .sha256 to the download URL to get the signature and/or checksum. See here for details about the signature keys.

The current version is 1.37.5. Release notes and Release history.

Recoll Installation / building manual.

The input handlers/filters used for some document types may need external packages not installed on your system by default, and not installed automatically with Recoll: take a look at the list and decide what you need to install.

The Recoll term explorer tool in phonetic mode (marginally useful and optional), and the orthographic suggestions made when a search fails, use the aspell package, version 0.60 (utf-8 support) or newer.

What do the release numbers mean?

The Recoll releases are numbered X.Y.Z. The X would only change for really major modifications like a big change in the index format, and possibly won’t ever reach 2.

Y is for functional modifications. These may bring bugs, so if you don’t need the new features, you may want to wait a little, and especially skip the first release (X.Y.0), at least for a few weeks.

Z changes for bug fixes only, and moving from X.Y.Z to X.Y.Z+u should in general involve little risk of regression. But, any change can bring problems, if you are not affected by the corrected bugs, there is probably no necessity to upgrade anyway.

Known bugs

See the Recoll issue tracker.

Source

Current Recoll release

The cutting edge

Previous Recoll release

Source repository:

The Recoll source repository is hosted on framagit.org. In periods where the trunk is a bit on the bleeding edge, there is a maintenance branch for the current production version.

Gnome Shell Search Provider

This can be used with all recent Gnome Desktop versions to include Recoll search results in the Gnome Shell search, and replaces the Unity Scope for recent Ubuntu versions (18.04/bionic and newer).

Source: gssp-recoll-1.1.1.tar.gz

Packages exist for Ubuntu (on the Recoll PPA). For other systems, the module is trivial to install. Download the above file, then, in a terminal window:

# Download the tar file
# Go to the Downloads directory
cd
cd Downloads
# Install dependancies (Debian example)
sudo apt install make python3-pydbus
# Extract the archive and Change directory
tar xzf gssp-recoll-1.1.1.tar.gz
cd gssp-recoll-1.1.1
# Install
./configure --prefix=/usr
make
sudo make install
# Clean up
cd ..
rm -rf gssp-recoll-1.1.1*

Then restart the desktop (Alt-F2 then 'r' with xorg, login/logout with the new stuff).

Ubuntu Unity Lens and Scope (obsolete)

You will probably get these from the PPA, but here are the source files. These are not included in the main tar file any more. For any Recoll version after 1.19 (choose on the Ubuntu version, not the Recoll one):

Prerequisites for building from source:

  • C++ compiler. Be aware that its absence sometimes manifests itself by quite cryptic messages.

  • Xapian core development libraries. Most Linux distributions carry them in their package repository. Or you will find source and binary packages on the Xapian download page.
    Note on building Xapian for older CPUs: The build configurations for Xapian releases 1.0.21 and 1.2.1 or newer enable the use of SSE2 floating point instructions. These instructions are not available in CPUs older than Intel Pentium 4 or AMD Athlon 64. When building for such a CPU, you need to add the --disable-sse flag to the Xapian library configure command. If this is not done, the problem signals itself by "Illegal instruction" crashes (SIGILL) in recollindex and recoll.

  • Qt development files: Qt 5.3 or newer (5.2 not ok).

  • Qt WebKit development files: these are quite often distributed apart from the main Qt libraries. It is possible to configure Recoll not to use Qt WebKit (see configure --help).

  • zlib development files.

  • X11 development files.

  • Python development package: you can avoid needing this by configuring with --disable-python-module.

Instructions for building

Normally, it’s just:

./configure; make; make install

If a bit more detail is needed, there is some in the manual.

Packages

Packages or ports for Recoll are available in the standard repositories for many distributions.

However they are often a bit older or built with older Xapian releases. Here follow some pointers to find newer packages for some distributions. In most cases, you will just need to use an alternate repository.

Debian

The Debian Recoll packages are not always up to date in stable distributions.

I am maintaining a repository for newer versions of the packages. The repository has a variety of versions depending on Debian series and architecture, but they are newer than the standard ones, and usually the latest for recent series (stretch, buster, bullseye) and x86. There is a separate repository for Raspbian Jessie, which is not compatible with vanilla Debian.

Note
 December 2020: updating the expired key. Because the format of the sources list file slightly changed to conform to newer Debian practises (using a signed-by attribute), you need both to import the repository keyring, and update your sources file.

To add the Debian or Raspbian repository to your sources:

If you prefer to manually install the packages, they are here: https://www.lesbonscomptes.com/upmpdcli/downloads/debian/pool/main/r/recoll/

Ubuntu

There are Personal Package Archives on launchpad.net for Recoll, kio-recoll and the recoll Unity Scope. These were built from the latest versions, for the current set of supported Ubuntu versions. Procedure:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:recoll-backports/recoll-1.15-on
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install recoll

The packages in the PPA now have a separate package for the Python extension, like the standard ones, so there should be no more conflict issues while switching from the PPA to the normal repositories and back.

Mint Linux

The Ubuntu PPA works perfectly for Mint 13 (and probably other releases too). Just follow the instructions for Ubuntu.

AppImage executable

This is new and still a bit experimental, we now provide a Recoll executable in AppImage format.

This is a directly executable file which should run on most Linux systems newer than Debian Buster.

The image includes the GUI and the indexer (which you can’t run independantly, start it from the GUI instead), along with antiword and unrtf (small and useful helpers). It will index many common formats without needing external programs: text, HTML, libreoffice, current versions of MS Office (XML), CHM, old MS-Word (.doc) and rtf.

It will need external helpers for some others, mainly:

  • PDF, but poppler is preinstalled on many systems

  • Audio files (needs the Python3 mutagen module).

  • Image files (needs the Image::ExifTool Perl module).

  • MS pptx (needs the Python3 lxml module)

Here follows the "missing list" obtained by indexing a test data directory on a more or less pristine Debian Buster system, indicating what you may need to install, depending on your document types.

Perl::Image::ExifTool (image/gif image/jpeg image/png image/tiff image/x-xcf)
catdvi (application/x-dvi)
djvutxt (image/vnd.djvu)
jupyter (application/x-ipynb+json)
lyx (application/x-lyx)
pffexport (application/vnd.ms-outlook)
python3:lxml (application/vnd.ms-visio.drawing application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.presentationml.presentation)
python3:mutagen (application/ogg audio/flac audio/mpeg)
python3:py7zr (application/x-7z-compressed)
python3:pylzma (application/x-7z-compressed)
python3:rarfile/python3:unrar (application/x-rar)
wpd2html (application/vnd.wordperfect)
xsltproc (application/x-kword)

The current version is an 1.38 pre-release, I offer it in hope to get some feedback about the idea. To test it, dowload the .AppImage file, make it executable (chmod +x Recoll-1.38-x86_64.AppImage), and run it (./Recoll-1.38-x86_64.AppImage).

Slackware

Recoll 1.32 packages built by Shin-ichi Abe (JW), with useful helpers, for slackware-15.0.RC1:

RPMS

You’ll need to install the Xapian, Qt, Qt-Webkit and zlib development packages if you want use the source rpms.

OpenSUSE

Recoll is in the KDE:Extra repository. You just need to add the repository to your software sources (Yast2→software→Software repositories).

Repository list (supported Suse versions).

After adding the appropriate repository to your software sources, you will be able to install recoll and kio_recoll from the software management interface. The Xapian dependancy will also be satisfied from the build service repository. Some of the older repositories do not build antiword, just tell the software manager to "break" recoll by installing anyway, and get antiword somewhere else.

CentOS 7

Recoll 1.33.5 rpm. CHM support and the Python extension are not included for ease of build reasons.

Microsoft Windows

The port of Recoll to Windows lacks a few goodies like multi-thread execution. Be aware that I ask for a small contribution to download it. More info here.

Mac OS X

We now have a specific page about this.

Translations

Most of the translations for the current release are usually incomplete, and many languages are missing. See the page about helping out for how to update or create them if you are in a position to do so.

This page sometimes lists language files which have been updated since the latest release.

No unreleased updated translations exist at the moment.

Note that, if you are running an older release, you may find updated messages by looking inside the appropriate maintenance branch in the source repository.