On April 22, 1998 Peter Dykes wrote:

> I am trying to set up SWISH-E on an Apache server and index the site =
> using AutoSwish. The scripts seem to be working ok except that no index =
> files are created. paths and directory permissions are ok. Any ideas?


I had a similar-sounding problem -- the error when searching was:

   "err: the index file(s) is empty" 

It was caused by putting a line break in the VALUE part of the ReplaceRules
INPUT tag of the AutoSwish home page.  The line break creates a line in the
.conf file which swish-e, called by swish_create.pl via AutoSwish, cannot 
understand because it doesn't start with a "ReplaceRules" keyword; this 
causes swish-e to fail.

This failure is, however, not reported in AutoSwish, nor does it cause 
swish_create to fail.

If you suspect something like this is causing your problem you can make the 
error more visible two ways:

1. Run the indexing operation from the command line:

   a. Where foo is the directory name you supplied to AutoSwish, delete 
      any existing foo.swish from your SwishIndexes directory.

      From your ConfigFiles directory:
      % swish-e -c foo.conf

      In my case, things perked along for a while, but then:
      Segmentation Fault (core dumped)

   b. Comment-out lines of foo.conf and repeat (a.) until swish-e 
      finishes properly.

2. If you want AutoSwish to report failure, you can add something like the 
   following to swish_create.pl in "sub index" where original indexing
   starts (about line 263):

     ...
     }else{

     # Start an HTML page
     &html_header("Indexing with SWISH-E: Step 2a, Indexing");
     print "Begin indexing: <BR>\n";

     # This creates the index (foo.swish) and stores the report from swish-e 
     # for later display by swish_create.  
     # This line is already in swish_create.pl.
     $return = `$SWISHDIR/swish-e -c $CONFIGDIR/$userid/$FORM{'ConfigFile'}`;

     # If swish-e finished properly $return will not be empty.
     if ( $return eq "" )
     {
         # Display the error
         &return_error (500, "CGI Error",
                             "Indexing appears to have failed.");
     }

     # Report
     print "Indexing finished.<BR>\n";

     # Finish the page.
     print "</BODY></HTML>";

     ...


Eric Lee
ericlee@oise.utoronto.ca