Install Sphinx & Thinking Sphinx in Debian

Install Sphinx & Thinking Sphinx in Debian

edit

Posted by Vince Wadhwani on Jun 28, 2008

I've been using Ferret to do searches in BuyIndie for a quite a while now. It works ok but I know there are better solutions out there. One of those that I'm experimenting with is Sphinx. If you want to play along and install it along with the Thinking Sphinx plugin, here's how you do it.

 

1. Update and Grab dependencies. Run these commands in order to get the files you need to install Sphinx.

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
sudo apt-get install build-essential
sudo apt-get install libmysqlclient15-dev

2. Download Sphinx. The latest code can be grabbed from their website

3.Untar the source and prep . Here's where it gets a bit complicated. You'll need to extract the source, change into the directory and configure Sphinx. Do that with these commands.

tar xvzf sphinx-0.9.8-rc2.tar.gz
cd sphinx-0.9.8-rc2/
./configure --with-mysql-includes=/usr/include/mysql --with-mysql-libs=/usr/lib/mysql

4. Make and Install Sphinx Run the standard linux commands to install Sphinx.

make
sudo make install

Hey, congrats, you've now got Sphinx installed on Debian! Next is to grab Thinking Sphinx . You can do that from the root of your rails directory by running the script/plugin install command.

script/plugin install  git://github.com/freelancing-god/thinking-sphinx.git

That should be it. I haven't actually started playing yet. But all signs look good so far.