---
title: "Configuration Example"
id: textsearch-configuration
pg_version: "20devel"
---

<a id="textsearch-configuration"></a>

## 12.7. Configuration Example

A text search configuration specifies all options necessary to transform a document into a `tsvector`: the parser to use to break text into tokens, and the dictionaries to use to transform each token into a lexeme. Every call of `to_tsvector` or `to_tsquery` needs a text search configuration to perform its processing. The configuration parameter [`default_text_search_config` (`string`)](runtime-config-client.md#guc-default-text-search-config) specifies the name of the default configuration, which is the one used by text search functions if an explicit configuration parameter is omitted. It can be set in `postgresql.conf`, or set for an individual session using the `SET` command. 

Several predefined text search configurations are available, and you can create custom configurations easily. To facilitate management of text search objects, a set of SQL commands is available, and there are several psql commands that display information about text search objects ([Section 12.10](textsearch-psql.md)). 

As an example we will create a configuration `pg`, starting by duplicating the built-in `english` configuration: 
CREATE TEXT SEARCH CONFIGURATION public.pg ( COPY = pg_catalog.english );
 

We will use a PostgreSQL-specific synonym list and store it in `$SHAREDIR/tsearch_data/pg_dict.syn`. The file contents look like: 
postgres    pg
pgsql       pg
postgresql  pg
 We define the synonym dictionary like this: 
CREATE TEXT SEARCH DICTIONARY pg_dict (
    TEMPLATE = synonym,
    SYNONYMS = pg_dict
);
 Next we register the Ispell dictionary `english_ispell`, which has its own configuration files: 
CREATE TEXT SEARCH DICTIONARY english_ispell (
    TEMPLATE = ispell,
    DictFile = english,
    AffFile = english,
    StopWords = english
);
 Now we can set up the mappings for words in configuration `pg`: 
ALTER TEXT SEARCH CONFIGURATION pg
    ALTER MAPPING FOR asciiword, asciihword, hword_asciipart,
                      word, hword, hword_part
    WITH pg_dict, english_ispell, english_stem;
 We choose not to index or search some token types that the built-in configuration does handle: 
ALTER TEXT SEARCH CONFIGURATION pg
    DROP MAPPING FOR email, url, url_path, sfloat, float;
 

Now we can test our configuration: 
SELECT * FROM ts_debug('public.pg', '
PostgreSQL, the highly scalable, SQL compliant, open source object-relational
database management system, is now undergoing beta testing of the next
version of our software.
');
 

The next step is to set the session to use the new configuration, which was created in the `public` schema: 
=> \dF
   List of text search configurations
 Schema  | Name | Description
---------+------+-------------
 public  | pg   |

SET default_text_search_config = 'public.pg';
SET

SHOW default_text_search_config;
 default_text_search_config
----------------------------
 public.pg