Spotlight

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Introduction

This page is meant to give an overview about compiling and configuring Samba with support for OS X Spotlight support.

Samba uses Gnome Tracker as search engine, search tool and metadata storage system.

Prerequisites

You need the following packages installed: tracker and libtracker-sparql-dev, the exact name may be different on your system.

Compiling

Configure samba with --enable-spotlight:

$ ./configure ... --enable spotlight ...
...
Checking for tracker-sparql-1.0                                                                 : not found 
Checking for tracker-sparql-0.16                                                                : yes 
Checking for header tracker-sparql.h                                                            : yes 
Checking for library tracker-sparql-0.16                                                        : yes 
Checking for library glib-2.0                                                                   : yes 
Checking for library gio-2.0                                                                    : yes 
Checking for library gobject-2.0                                                                : yes 
building with Spotlight support
...

Running Samba

Tracker uses DBUS for IPC between Tracker processes and processes that want to run queries against the Tracker metadata store. Therefor you have to carefully start Samba, a dbus-daemon instance and Tracker ensuring all processes are then able to communicate with each other over the correct DBUS bus: Samba Spotlight Start Script. The magic that makes this work is the environment variable DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS.

The dbus-daemon that is started from the script need its config file with a matching DBUS session address, here's an example: Spotlight DBUS Configuration File.

Another point to keep in mind is the location where Tracker stores its config and database. Tracker was developed with a per-user use case in mind, as such configuration and data is put in locations relative to the users home directory of the uid of the Tracker processes. By changing the value of the HOME environment variable (a more fine grained approach is modifying the environment variables of the XDG basedir specification).

Configuring Tracker and using Tracker tools

In order to use Tracker commandline tools, you have to run a root shell and source these shell commands:

# cat .tracker_env
INSTALLDIR=/some/dir
TRACKER_DIR="$INSTALLDIR/var/tracker"
export HOME="$TRACKER_DIR"
export DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS="unix:path=$INSTALLDIR/var/run/spotlight.ipc"
# . .tracker_env
#

Now you can tell Tracker which directories to index:

# gsettings set org.freedesktop.Tracker.Miner.Files index-recursive-directories "['/Volumes/spotlight']"

Configuring Samba

You can the Spotlight RPC service mdssvc either as an smbd embedded service or by using the mdssd RPC daemon:

[global]
    ....
    rpc_server:mdssvc = embedded
    ....

or

[global]
    ....
    rpc_daemon:mdssd = fork
    rpc_server:mdssvc = external
    ....

Finally enable Spotlight searching on a per share basis:

[share]
    path = /some/path
    spotlight = yes