Spotlight stops indexing Applications

All of a sudden spotlight on my macOS Mojave macmini stopped working…

There is a process called mdutil which manages the metadata stores used by Spotlight and was the culprit for my issue.

The fix after some Google Fu and some trial and error was to restart this process as follows:

sudo mdutil -a -i off  
sudo launchctl unload -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.metadata.mds.plist  
sudo launchctl load -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.metadata.mds.plist  
sudo mdutil -a -i on

Hopefully this won’t happen too often but if it does at least I have a fix!

Success? 🎉