Beagle

There are several environment variables which can be set to control behaviour of beagle daemon and tools. These variables are mostly for advanced users and some of them are just for debugging purposes. Using them should not be necessary under normal circumstances. This page lists some of them and their usage.

For all beagle tools

• BEAGLE_HOME: Sets the directory in which Beagle will operate. Indexes and settings are stored in a .beagle underneath this directory, and Beagle won't crawl above this directory unless configured to do so. Mostly useful as a debugging aide for setting up small sandboxes to index within.
• BEAGLE_STORAGE: Similar to BEAGLE_HOME, but this directory is where only the .beagle directory resides. Indexing is done in the user's home directory, as normal. If you use this, make sure you set it either to be a dot directory (like .beagle) or outside of the home directory. Otherwise Beagle will try to index its own indexes, and Bad Things will happen.

For beagled

• BEAGLE_EXERCISE_THE_DOG: When set, the Beagle daemon will run at full throttle, indexing data as fast as possible. This will significantly affect your system performance but is the fastest way to index data.
• MONO_EXTERNAL_ENCODINGS: If set to anything other than "utf8", the platform encoding will be used to read the names of the files and directories. Otherwise UTF8 is the default encoding used.

For beagle-search

• BEAGLE_SEARCH_SCOPE: A semicolon-separated list of label="scope query string". This is useful for adding extra categories to the drop-down category list in beagle-search. When the category label is selected, the scope query string will be added to the query. E.g. you can set BEAGLE_SEARCH_SCOPE="MP3=ext:mp3;Movie=filetype:movie source:windows" to add two custom categories.

These are mostly useful for debugging beagled:

• BEAGLE_DISABLE_INOTIFY: Disables support for inotify.
• BEAGLE_DISABLE_XATTR: Disables support for extended attributes.
• BEAGLE_INOTIFY_VERBOSE: Prints out verbose information about Beagle's inotify usage.
• BEAGLE_SYNCHRONIZE_LOCALLY: Tells the daemon to behave as if it were on a remote file system such as NFS.
• BEAGLE_WEBSERVER_DIR: The files needed for beagle web interface usually resides in /usr/share/beagle/webinterface. Set this environment variable to use files from a different path. This is useful for debugging or if you want to change something and you do not have write permission on the installed files.