Installing Sphinx

Tuesday, 27 January 2009

On Ubuntu Intrepid, this will get you Sphinx for rapid super-fast full-text searching.

sudo apt-get install libmysqlclient15-dev
wget http://www.sphinxsearch.com/downloads/sphinx-0.9.8.1.tar.gz
tar -xzvf sphinx*.gz
cd sphinx*
./configure
sudo make
sudo make install

sudo gem install ultrasphinx

Tested and works ok

More here

Note about Ubuntu Installs

Had a bit of a problem with installing this on Ubuntu, RAKE just couldn't find the inspector and searchd binaries.

Found a way to fix this by configuring it like....

./configure --prefix=/usr/local/sphinx

Then doing the usual make and make install, but creating a symlink afterwards with

ln -s /usr/bin /usr/local/sphinx/bin

And then added a path to my .bashrc file, probably overkill after the first bit but got it working.

nano ~/.bashrc

Then adding...

PATH="$PATH:/usr/local/bin"
PATH="$PATH:/usr/local/sphinx/bin"

Missing Programs?

Note, if you're logged in as a normal user some system commands like smartctl will return command not found even though you know you installed them.

Just use sudo at the start and they should be found and run.