# Basic instructions

1. Use omindex to build an index of your website:

       $ omindex --db DBPATH --url / WEBPATH

> Where DBPATH is where you want the database, such as /var/lib/omega/data/default and WEBPATH is the directory containing all your web documents - e.g. /var/www.

> To start off with, it is advisable to have the final directory of the database be called 'default'. This is what Omega expects, although it can be changed once you've got things going.

2. Edit omega.conf:

> This contains 3 settings, written one per line as "<SETTING> <VALUE>":

> - database_dir - this should point to the directory containing your database(s), for example /var/lib/omega/data (this should contain a database called 'default' which is the database you indexed to above).
> - template_dir - the directory where the OmegaScript templates are, for example /var/lib/omega/templates (this should contain an OmegaScript template called 'query' which is used by default).
> - log_dir - the directory which the OmegaScript $log command writes log files to, for example /var/log/omega .

3. Test omega from the command line:

       $ /usr/lib/xapian-omega/bin/omega 'P=my search terms' HITSPERPAGE=10

> (The path to omega may be different in your installation.)

> This will output quite a lot of HTML. Normally you use omega via CGI, but it also has this test mode which is useful for checking that everything works independent of your webserver configuration. To actually use omega, you should install it to run via CGI by copying or linking the omega executable into your cgi-bin directory.

> For more information, see the overview document. There are other documents covering the CGI parameters which omega accepts, and the OmegaScript language used to control the format of omega's output.