Inspiration for this snippet was taken from this post on the Sphinx forum, plus this blog post.
Compiling Sphinx
First install the prerequisites:
sudo aptitude install libmysql++-dev libmysqlclient15-dev checkinstall
Next download sphinx, libstemmer and install everything and the fish:
cd /usr/local/src
wget http://sphinxsearch.com/downloads/sphinx-0.9.9.tar.gz
tar zxvf sphinx-0.9.9.tar.gz
cd sphinx-0.9.9/
# Add stemming support for Swedish, Finnish and other fun languages.
wget http://snowball.tartarus.org/dist/libstemmer_c.tgz
tar zxvf libstemmer_c.tgz
./configure --with-libstemmer
make
make install
Configure Sphinx
Create a sphinx.conf file in your Rails config directory, as described here, or use this template.
Install acts_as_sphinx plugin
./script/plugin install http://svn.datanoise.com/acts_as_sphinx
Add acts_as_sphinx to your model:
class Documents
acts_as_sphinx
end
Indexing content
rake sphinx:index
(in /var/www/xxx.com/releases/20080429144230)
Sphinx 0.9.8-rc2 (r1234)
Copyright (c) 2001-2008, Andrew Aksyonoff
using config file './sphinx.conf'...
indexing index 'xxx.com'...
collected 5077 docs, 0.6 MB
sorted 0.1 Mhits, 100.0% done
total 5077 docs, 632096 bytes
total 0.160 sec, 3950427.25 bytes/sec, 31729.86 docs/sec
Reindexing content
sphinx:index shouldn't be run while the searchd process is running, so use rake sphinx:rotate instead, which restarts the searchd process after indexing.
Starting the daemon
mkdir -m 664 /var/log/sphinx
rake sphinx:start
(in /var/www/xxx.com/releases/20080429144230)
Sphinx 0.9.8-rc2 (r1234)
Copyright (c) 2001-2008, Andrew Aksyonoff
using config file './sphinx.conf'...
Sphinx searchd server started.
Searching
Documents.find_with_sphinx 'why did I write this'