# Index Opening and Creation

All index operations (e.g., creating a new index, adding a document to the index, deleting a document, searching through the index) need an index object. One can be obtained using one of the following two methods.

Lucene Index Creation

    $index = Zend_Search_Lucene::create($indexPath);

Lucene Index Opening

    $index = Zend_Search_Lucene::open($indexPath);