Day 9: Magento, Rebuilding The Search Index Automatically

Imag­ine my sur­prise when I read that Magento, an advanced ecom­merce plat­form, doesn’t rebuild the search index when prod­uct data has changed. A client of mine had to go to Index Man­age­ment every day to keep the full text search updated, and that’s not acceptable.

This is blog post 9/30 for #30DaysOfCreativity.

So I googled around for a while to find out how we could go about cod­ing a PHP script that did this. Once we have that, we can eas­ily run it a cou­ple of times per day using a sim­ple cron-job. I found one thread on the Magento Forum titled “Rebuild search index within code?”—exactly what we were look­ing for.

The credit goes to the user Daim for this one, so feel free to thank him in the men­tioned thread or a PM. As with most things Magento, the solu­tion is fairly sim­ple once you’ve actu­ally seen a work­ing piece of code.

Here’s the com­plete script that rebuilds the search index. I’m merely copy & past­ing it from the thread for ref­er­ence, chang­ing the suc­cess and error noti­fi­ca­tions to some­thing more proper:

require 'app/Mage.php';

if (!Mage::isInstalled()) {
  echo "Application is not installed yet, please complete install wizard first.";
  exit;
}

// Only for urls
// Don't remove this
$_SERVER['SCRIPT_NAME'] = str_replace(basename(__FILE__), 'index.php', $_SERVER['SCRIPT_NAME']);
$_SERVER['SCRIPT_FILENAME'] = str_replace(basename(__FILE__), 'index.php', $_SERVER['SCRIPT_FILENAME']);
Mage::app();
try {
  Mage::getSingleton('catalogsearch/fulltext')->rebuildIndex();
  echo "Search index successfully rebuilt.";
}
catch (Mage_Core_Exception $e) {
  echo "Failed to rebuild search index: " . $e->getMessage();
}
catch (Exception $e) {
  echo "Failed to rebuild the search index. Non-Magento exception thrown.";
}

The snip­pet that actu­ally rebuilds the index is of course this one:

Mage::getSingleton('catalogsearch/fulltext')->rebuildIndex();

This is run­ning fine on Magento Com­mu­nity Edi­tion 1.4.0.1. We’ve set up a cron-job that rebuilds the index twice every day. I’m guess­ing it will run equally well on a Magento 1.3 instal­la­tion since the post was writ­ten in June 2009 and 1.4 had not been released back then.

So if you’re run­ning a Magento shop, I sug­gest you run this script or a sim­i­lar one approx­i­mately as fre­quently as you do changes to your prod­ucts. This will keep your full text search index up-to-date and your cus­tomers will be able to find what they’re look­ing for.

UPDATE:

While it seems to run fine in Magento 1.4, there’s a bet­ter way of doing it which is to sim­ply run one of the shell-scripts that are pro­vided in the /shell folder of your Magento root.

php /var/www/vhosts/your_magento_site/htdocs/shell/indexer.php reindexall

Source: Yireo.com

• Table Rate Ship­ping in Magento
• Mov­ing Magento To A New Server
• Day 8: Instant Domain Search
• Day 15: Web Design Best Practices
• Clean Up After Drupal