Getting Started with Apache Tika
This document describes how to build Apache Tika from sources and how to start using Tika in an application.
Getting and building the sources
To build Tika from sources you first need to either download a source release or checkout the latest sources from version control.
Once you have the sources, you can build them using the Maven 2 build system. Executing the following command in the base directory will build the sources and install the resulting artifacts in your local Maven repository.
mvn install
See the Maven documentation for more information about the available build options.
Note that you need Java 6 or higher to build Tika.
Build artifacts
The Tika build consists of a number of components and produces the following main binaries:
- tika-core/target/tika-core-*.jar
- Tika core library. Contains the core interfaces and classes of Tika, but none of the parser implementations. Depends only on Java 6.
- tika-parsers/target/tika-parsers-*.jar
- Tika parsers. Collection of classes that implement the Tika Parser interface based on various external parser libraries.
- tika-app/target/tika-app-*.jar
- Tika application. Combines the above components and all the external parser libraries into a single runnable jar with a GUI and a command line interface.
- tika-bundle/target/tika-bundle-*.jar
- Tika bundle. An OSGi bundle that combines tika-parsers with non-OSGified parser libraries to make them easy to deploy in an OSGi environment.
Using Tika as a Maven dependency
The core library, tika-core, contains the key interfaces and classes of Tika and can be used by itself if you don't need the full set of parsers from the tika-parsers component. The tika-core dependency looks like this:
<dependency>
<groupId>org.apache.tika</groupId>
<artifactId>tika-core</artifactId>
<version>...</version>
</dependency>If you want to use Tika to parse documents (instead of simply detecting document types, etc.), you'll want to depend on tika-parsers instead:
<dependency>
<groupId>org.apache.tika</groupId>
<artifactId>tika-parsers</artifactId>
<version>...</version>
</dependency>Note that adding this dependency will introduce a number of transitive dependencies to your project, including one on tika-core. You need to make sure that these dependencies won't conflict with your existing project dependencies. You can use the following command in the tika-parsers directory to get a full listing of all the dependencies.
$ mvn dependency:tree | grep :compile
Using Tika in an Ant project
Unless you use a dependency manager tool like Apache Ivy, the easiest way to use Tika is to include either the tika-core or the tika-app jar in your classpath, depending on whether you want just the core functionality or also all the parser implementations.
<classpath>
... <!-- your other classpath entries -->
<!-- either: -->
<pathelement location="path/to/tika-core-${tika.version}.jar"/>
<!-- or: -->
<pathelement location="path/to/tika-app-${tika.version}.jar"/>
</classpath>Using Tika as a command line utility
The Tika application jar (tika-app-*.jar) can be used as a command line utility for extracting text content and metadata from all sorts of files. This runnable jar contains all the dependencies it needs, so you don't need to worry about classpath settings to run it.
The usage instructions are shown below.
usage: java -jar tika-app.jar [option...] [file|port...]
Options:
-? or --help Print this usage message
-v or --verbose Print debug level messages
-V or --version Print the Apache Tika version number
-g or --gui Start the Apache Tika GUI
-s or --server Start the Apache Tika server
-f or --fork Use Fork Mode for out-of-process extraction
-x or --xml Output XHTML content (default)
-h or --html Output HTML content
-t or --text Output plain text content
-T or --text-main Output plain text content (main content only)
-m or --metadata Output only metadata
-j or --json Output metadata in JSON
-y or --xmp Output metadata in XMP
-l or --language Output only language
-d or --detect Detect document type
-eX or --encoding=X Use output encoding X
-pX or --password=X Use document password X
-z or --extract Extract all attachements into current directory
--extract-dir=<dir> Specify target directory for -z
-r or --pretty-print For XML and XHTML outputs, adds newlines and
whitespace, for better readability
--create-profile=X
Create NGram profile, where X is a profile name
--list-parsers
List the available document parsers
--list-parser-details
List the available document parsers, and their supported mime types
--list-detectors
List the available document detectors
--list-met-models
List the available metadata models, and their supported keys
--list-supported-types
List all known media types and related information
Description:
Apache Tika will parse the file(s) specified on the
command line and output the extracted text content
or metadata to standard output.
Instead of a file name you can also specify the URL
of a document to be parsed.
If no file name or URL is specified (or the special
name "-" is used), then the standard input stream
is parsed. If no arguments were given and no input
data is available, the GUI is started instead.
- GUI mode
Use the "--gui" (or "-g") option to start the
Apache Tika GUI. You can drag and drop files from
a normal file explorer to the GUI window to extract
text content and metadata from the files.
- Server mode
Use the "--server" (or "-s") option to start the
Apache Tika server. The server will listen to the
ports you specify as one or more arguments.You can also use the jar as a component in a Unix pipeline or as an external tool in many scripting languages.
# Check if an Internet resource contains a specific keyword curl http://.../document.doc \ | java -jar tika-app.jar --text \ | grep -q keyword
