This blog post will help you install Sphinx 2.0.4 on Ubuntu 10.04.
About Sphinx
Sphinx is a distributed search engine for full text searches. While MySQL offers its own storage engine (MyISAM) for full text searches but its not easy to scale it. Sphinx has many other advantages like:
- better indexing and searching speed
- good relevance search
- and most importantly better scalability
Sphinx has two parts:
indexer - This part indexes the data source by pulling information from it and then builds indexes.
searchd - This part serves search queries by looking up in the index created by the indexer.
Installing Sphinx
Following steps will help you install Sphinx successfully on your Ubuntu box:
First check if the dependencies are already installed. If not install them.
sudo apt-get install libmysql++-dev libmysqlclient15-dev checkinstall
Download Sphinx 2.0.4 in '/tmp'
cd /tmp
sudo wget http://sphinxsearch.com/files/sphinx-2.0.4-release.tar.gz
Unpack the 'tar.gz' file and install Sphinx
sudo tar -xzf sphinx-2.0.4-release.tar.gz
The above command will unpack the 'tar.gz' file. You can find the contents in 'sphinx-2.0.4-release' directory
cd sphinx-2.0.4-release
Make install
sudo ./configure
sudo make
sudo checkinstall
Note: You will be prompted to create a directory and set a description for the package. Also it will ask you some questions with default answers. Fill them as per your convenience.I had an error in package installation. On checking the log file I saw that specifying version was mandatory. So changed version to 2.0.4.
After installation, the package will be saved to:
/tmp/sphinx-2.0.4-release/sphinx-2.0.4_2.0.4-1_i386.deb
Make a new folder to keep the *.deb package:
sudo mkdir /home/[YOUR_USERNAME]/SphinxInstalls
Move the sphinx-2.0.4_2.0.4-1_i386.deb package from '/tmp/sphinx-2.0.4-release/sphinx-2.0.4_2.0.4-1_i386.deb' to '/home/[YOUR_USERNAME]/SphinxInstalls'
sudo mv /tmp/sphinx-2.0.4-release/sphinx-2.0.4_2.0.4-1_i386.deb /home/[YOUR_USERNAME]/SphinxInstalls
You can now delete the working folder and the tar.gz file :
sudo rm -r /tmp/sphinx-2.0.4-release
sudo rm /tmp/sphinx-2.0.4-release.tar.gz
Location of Configuration/Daemons/Documentation
You can find Sphinx Documentation in:
/usr/share/doc/sphinx-2.0.4
Sphinx Configurations are found in '/usr/local/etc/'. The configuration files that exists by default are:
example.sql
sphinx.conf.dist
sphinx-min.conf.dist
Note: Default Sphinx configuration is sphinx.conf. It is not created by default. So you can copy 'sphinx.conf.dist' as 'sphinx.conf':
sudo cp sphinx.conf.dist sphinx.conf
Sphinx Processes (indexer, searchd etc.) are found in '/usr/local/bin/'.
To remove Sphinx: sudo dpkg -r sphinxsearch-2.0.4To install again use the package in '/home/[YOUR_USERNAME]/SphinxInstalls': sudo dpkg -i sphinx-2.0.4_2.0.4-1_i386.deb
You are done with the installation of Sphinx on your Ubuntu box. In my upcoming posts I will cover Sphinx configuration (configuring local indexes and distributed instances).
^^^^ Coming this weekend
^^^^ Coming this weekend
