I don't want to index in background constantly, how do I setup a crontab?

A good practice is to set a reindex roundtrip delay to for example 24 hours. This is done by placing SleepRoundtrip=86400 (which is 60 sec * 60 mins * 24 hrs) in the last asearch.cnf file of you Alkaline groups.

Another solution is to tell Alkaline not to index in background, this is done by placing Reindex=N in each asearch.cnf file or by running Alkaline with --noreindex . Then, you can use standard Unix crontab to reindex your site and restarting Alkaline once the indexing is finished.

A typical crontab line (to edit crontab, run crontab -e , check the crontab man pages under Unix) looks like this:
# place on one single line
0 5 * * * 
 pushd /asearch.1.7/ ;
 ./asearch.Linux foo reindex ; 
 ./tools/Perl/PerlTools/AlkalineReloadIndex.pl root password ;
 popd

This will reindex the foo site (./asearch foo reindex ) at 5 AM every morning (0 5 * * * ), and instruct Alkaline to reload the indexes (AlkalineReloadIndex.pl root password ) You can alternatively restart Alkaline with the AlkalineRestart.pl script or stop and start it using the AlkalineStop.pl script.