Reindexing the catalogue

When it is worth forcing a complete indexing, where it is done, what it costs, and what to do when the button does not finish.

On most days it is not needed. Price and stock arrive in seconds through real time, and the periodic sync goes over the catalogue on its own, at no cost. This guide is for the times when a lot changed at once and you do not want to wait; and since forcing has a price, small but real, it is worth knowing when it pays off.

When it is worth it

• A large product import, done by CSV or straight into the database.
• A structural change: renaming categories, redoing features, changing the combination structure.
• After turning the sharing of sales or cost price on or off in the PrestaShop module.
• After changing the field weights, if you want to see the effect immediately instead of waiting for the rebuild that saving already asked for.

When it is not worth it Price, stock and status changes arrive through real time in seconds. Reindexing because of that spends time, spends bTokens and changes nothing.

What it costs

There is a single rule, on every platform:

• Routine is free. Real time, the periodic sync, the first sync of a Shopify store and the hourly content pass cost nothing: they do not push against the plan limit and they do not generate overage.
• Forcing costs 1 bToken per 1,000 documents sent. A catalogue of 8,000 products costs 8 bTokens; one of 250 costs 1, because the count rounds up.

The price always shows before you confirm. In the panel, the button opens a dialog with the estimate for the catalogue in question; in the PrestaShop module, from version 0.22 onwards, the button shows the same warning and only starts once confirmed, on the first indexing as on the following ones; the command line prints it before starting. What is spent shows on the usage chart, on the reindex line, so it can be checked. See the plan and payments.

Where the button is

In the panel, for any platform: under Account → Stores, open the store's page and click Reindex everything. It is the only route on a Shopify store, where there is no module at all: Buskara fetches the catalogue from Shopify and rebuilds the engines by itself.

In the PrestaShop module, in the Buskara module configuration, the same Reindex everything button is still there, and does the same thing: the catalogue belongs to the store, and that is where the export starts. Clicking one or the other makes no difference; the run is the same and counts the same way.

Whichever button you use, the store's page in the panel is where you follow what is happening: Queued, Indexing… (sent / total) and finally Up to date, with the document total.

What you see while it runs

In the PrestaShop module, the catalogue goes up in batches: the page asks for one piece at a time, shows the bar moving with the items already sent, and reloads with the result at the end. It works this way because a single request sending tens of thousands of products ran into the server's time limit, and what showed up was a Request Timeout with no explanation at all.

Keep the tab open until it finishes. If you close it halfway, whatever went up stays there and the rest goes in the next indexing, whether that is another click on the button or the periodic sync.

Started from the panel, the run happens on our side, in a queue, and needs no tab open at all: you can close the page and come back whenever you like. On a PrestaShop store, the panel asks the store for the catalogue through the same address the periodic sync uses, so it has to be reachable from outside; see how the catalogue is indexed.

Without a browser, from the command line

For PrestaShop stores with many references, or to leave it running out of hours, the module ships the same work on the command line:

php modules/buskara/cli/reindex.php

It has no time limit at all and needs nobody in front of the screen. It counts like any other forced reindex, and it states the price before starting.

What happens to search in the meantime

It keeps answering, with the previous index. The swap happens at the end: visitors never get results from the middle of a rebuild, nor half a catalogue.

If the total does not add up

Compare the engine's document total with the number of active products in the store. A difference is almost always one of these: products that are inactive or not visible in the store, the products out of stock: hide option doing exactly what it was asked to do, or an indexing that has not finished yet. On a Shopify store, drafts, archived products and products not published on the online store channel also count, and they are left out on purpose.

The complete list of causes, in order of likelihood, is in products that do not show up.