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Requires creating a PHP page and installing some PHP extensions using PEAR.

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Less than 1 hour

Interfacing with searchbox requires the PEAR SOAP PHP extension. To verify which extensions you have already installed, open a shell and type pear list (you may need to execute this and the following commands as root). If the package SOAP is installed, proceed to the next step.

The SOAP extension is currently marked as beta, so the first thing you have to do is change the preferred_state PEAR configuration variable to the beta value: type pear config-set preferred_state beta.

Now you are ready to install the SOAP package: type pear install -a SOAP. PEAR will download and install the SOAP package and all dependent packages. During this stage, PEAR may complain about installed packages that are too old: in this case you will have to upgrade these packages by typing pear upgrade PackageName

If all went OK, PEAR will inform you that the SOAP package has been successfully installed. You can switch back to the stable value for the preferred_state PEAR configuration variable by typing pear config-set preferred_state stable. Now you are ready to proceed to the next pass.

You need to use the GUI to create a source and the corresponding archive that will hold the content you want to make searchable. See the GUI manual to learn how to do it.

After creating the archive, jot down its ID because we will need it in the next step. You may want to start the crawl in order to have some documents indexed to query later on.

You aren't really going to create anything here, because we have done the hard work for you! Grab the search.php file from the examples/cookbook/php-search-page directory of your searchbox installation and put it in a suitable place into your web server document directory.

You may want to change the $soapclient variable definition to adjust the username, password, hostname and port of your searchbox installation, and the $archives variable definition to change the 1 to the ID of the archive you have set up in the previous step.

Open your browser, and type the URL relative to the query.php page. A text field and a button should appear in your browser. Type in one or more keywords in the text field and press the button: search results should be displayed in the browser.

This simple search page lacks support for results pagination: you will be able to see only the first 10 results. You can implement pagination by using the FirstDoc and LastDoc query parameters. We leave the implementation to you as an exercise.