The 1.4 branch is the current stable release branch. We recommend you use this branch unless you have a particular need to use an older version.
The latest stable release is 1.4.27:
The wiki contains a summary of bugs, patches, and workarounds relating to the latest release.
The 1.2 branch is the previous stable release branch. We no longer provide support for this, and recommend upgrading to the current stable release series.
The latest old stable release is 1.2.25:
Packages of xapian-core, xapian-omega, xapian-bindings (Java, Python, Ruby, and Tcl), and the perl Search::Xapian module (the package name is libsearch-xapian-perl) are available from the Debian and Ubuntu repositories.
Backported Debian packages of newer versions are available from backports.debian.org.
Backported Ubuntu packages of newer 1.4.x versions are available from a Launchpad Personal Package Archive (PPA) maintained by Olly Betts. Follow the instructions on the PPA page for how to make use of these. Currently all packages are backported to all Ubuntu releases which are still supported.
Fedora have RPM packages for Xapian in their default repositories, though these may lag behind the latest releases a bit.
If you want a recent release, you'll probably need to build it yourself. EPEL has some older 1.2.x packages for RHEL 6 and RHEL 7, but note that we no longer support 1.2.x.
Packages for slackware linux are available from slackbuilds.
The source RPMs (the files that end in ".src.rpm") are not distribution specific - you can build binary RPMs from those if binary packages aren't available for your architecture or distribution like so:
$ rpmbuild --rebuild PACKAGENAME.src.rpm
These RPM-based distributions have their own RPM packages which might be better tailored:
The FreeBSD Ports Collection has packages for xapian-core, xapian-omega, xapian-bindings (Python, Ruby and PHP), and Search::Xapian.
The NetBSD pkgsrc collection has packages for xapian-core, xapian-omega, and Search::Xapian.
OpenBSD Ports has packages for xapian-core, xapian-omega and xapian-bindings (perl, python and ruby currently).
Homebrew has xapian-core and the bindings
for several languages packaged. For example, use
brew install --build-from-source xapian --with-python to install
the core library and the Python bindings (note that currently you need to have
installed python from Homebrew first).
The Fink project has packages for xapian-core, and the Python bindings.
Alternatively, MacPorts has packages for xapian-core.
Packages for xapian-core, xapian-bindings, and Search::Xapian are available from Cygwin Ports.
To build for native Microsoft Windows (not using Cygwin) the standard source tarball can be built using MSYS+mingw.