Netatalk 4.5.0
Search
Netatalk provides support for Spotlight-compatible search and indexing on macOS clients. This allows users to search for files and metadata on Netatalk volumes in macOS.
NOTE: The Netatalk development team has observed that in macOS, remote file systems can be searched only through Finder Search and not through the Spotlight Search widget access from the looking glass icon in the menu bar. This is a limitation of macOS and not of Netatalk.
Open a Finder window and use the search box in the top right corner, enter a search term, and make sure to select the Network neighborhood or the specific Netatalk volume in the search scope options.
For Classic Mac OS clients and very early Mac OS X clients, Netatalk provides support for the older search feature called Catalog Search, which is used by the Sherlock app in Mac OS.
Spotlight Search for macOS
Netatalk’s Spotlight-compatible search can be controlled with the spotlight option. Enabled by default, you can turn it on or off globally and per volume.
Spotlight query handling uses a pluggable backend architecture. The AFP Spotlight RPC protocol layer is shared, while query execution is delegated to a backend selected per volume.
You can select the backend with the volume option spotlight backend. If not set, the default is cnid which is the simple and lightweight backend that uses the Netatalk CNID database for filename search.
Example:
[Global]
spotlight = yes
[Documents]
path = /srv/afp/docs
spotlight backend = cnid
[Media]
path = /srv/afp/media
spotlight backend = localsearch
[Private]
path = /srv/afp/private
spotlight = no
Available Spotlight backends:
-
cnid Uses cnid_find() against the CNID database for filename-oriented searches. It has no extra runtime dependencies beyond the talloc library and Netatalk’s CNID database.
-
localsearch Uses the LocalSearch/Tracker SPARQL backend for broader file contents and metadata indexing/search. This backend requires LocalSearch/Tracker, TinySPARQL, GLib, D-Bus, and related tooling.
-
xapian Uses a per-volume Xapian index maintained by Netatalk for filename, plain-text content, and MIME type search. This backend requires xapian-core and libmagic.
NOTE: The xapian backend is considered EXPERIMENTAL and is not recommended for general use.
The xapian backend stores a shared per-volume index. To avoid indexing
private file contents into that shared index, it indexes body text only for
regular files that are world-readable, readable by the indexing process,
plain-text-like, and below the backend’s text size limit. Files readable to
a specific AFP user but not world-readable can still match filename and type
queries, but may not match content queries such as kMDItemTextContent.
Building Spotlight backends
The Meson option with-spotlight-backends controls which Spotlight backends are built. Supported values are cnid, localsearch, and xapian.
Example:
meson setup build -Dwith-spotlight-backends=cnid,localsearch,xapian
The default build enables the selected backends when their dependencies are available.
D-Bus daemon for localsearch
The dbus-daemon binary is required when using the localsearch backend. Its path is determined at compile time by the dbus-daemon build system option.
If dbus-daemon is installed at a different path, use the global option dbus daemon to specify it. For example, for Solaris with Tracker from OpenCSW:
dbus daemon = /opt/csw/bin/dbus-daemon
Catalog Search for Classic Mac OS
Netatalk leverages the CNID database for fast filename search on shared volumes. You can also control whether to use fast database search or the slower recursive directory scanning through the search db option.
