Search

Search
- Spotlight (Finder search) for macOS
- Catalog Search for Classic Mac OS

Netatalk provides support for Spotlight (Finder search) 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 (Finder search) for macOS

Netatalk’s Spotlight (Finder search) 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.

Searching for phrases and multiple words

A multi-word search (two words) is split into individual words by macOS and sent to the server as an OR of per-word predicates; the results contain files whose names match any of the words.
To search for words that must appear next to each other, wrap the phrase in double quotes in the Finder search field, for example "two words". With the cnid backend a phrase matches as a filename substring.
Searching within a folder returns only results from that folder and its subfolders. With the cnid backend the restriction is applied inside the CNID database; with the mysql CNID scheme that requires MySQL 8.0 or MariaDB 10.2, and older servers fall back to a volume-wide search that is filtered afterwards.

The localsearch and xapian backends do not yet support quoted phrase searches.

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.