Sphinx Installation

Sphinx comes in various pre-compiled packages (Windows, Red Hat, etc.), so if your operating system has a version already compiled and ready to install, you may just want to install one of those and be done with it.

You can find pre-compiled versions as well as source files (if you want to compile your own) here:

http://sphinxsearch.com/downloads/

This installation guide is designed for people who want to install/compile from source on a Linux system (and have admin/shell access)...

Log into your server's shell as root, and run the following commands (in order, obviously).

1. curl -O http://sphinxsearch.com/files/sphinx-2.0.6-release.tar.gz
2. tar -xzvf sphinx-2.0.6-release.tar.gz
3. cd sphinx-2.0.6-release
4. ./configure
5. make
6. make install
7. mkdir /home/sphinx
8. mkdir /home/sphinx-data
9. mkdir /usr/local/etc

There are two parts to Sphinx... the indexer program and the searchd program. Searchd is a daemon that listens for search requests and should always be running. Because of this, it's a good idea to setup a mechanism so it automatically loads when the server boots.

If your system supports init.d, you can create a /etc/init.d/searchd file with the following contents:

#! /bin/sh
#
#              Written by Shawn Hogan
#
# Comments to support LSB init script conventions
### BEGIN INIT INFO
# Provides: searchd
# Required-Start: $local_fs $network $remote_fs
# Required-Stop: $local_fs $network $remote_fs
# Default-Start:  2 3 4 5
# Default-Stop: 0 1 6
# Short-Description: start and stop searchd
# Description: searchd is the search daemon portion of Sphinx
### END INIT INFO
 
 
PATH=/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin
DAEMON=/usr/local/bin/searchd
NAME=searchd
DESC=searchd
PIDFILE=/home/sphinx/$NAME.pid
 
test -x $DAEMON || exit 0
##test -x $DAEMONBOOTSTRAP || exit 0
 
set -e
 
case "$1" in
start)
echo -n "Starting $DESC: "
nohup $DAEMON > /dev/null 2>&1 &
echo "$NAME."
;;
stop)
echo -n "Stopping $DESC: "
killproc -p $PIDFILE $DAEMON
echo "$NAME."
rm -f $PIDFILE
;;
restart)
echo -n "Stopping $DESC: "
killproc -p $PIDFILE $DAEMON
rm -f $PIDFILE
echo -n "Starting $DESC: "
$DAEMON 2>&1 &
;;
*)
N=/etc/init.d/$NAME
echo "Usage: $N {start|stop|restart}" >&2
exit 1
;;
esac
 
exit 0

Code (markup):

The run the following command from your shell to activate it for the various run-levels: insserv -vd /etc/init.d/searchd

The command should give you something along the lines of (which is a good thing):

enable service ../searchd -> /etc/init.d/rc2.d/S12searchd
enable service ../searchd -> /etc/init.d/rc2.d/K11searchd
enable service ../searchd -> /etc/init.d/rc3.d/S12searchd
enable service ../searchd -> /etc/init.d/rc3.d/K11searchd
enable service ../searchd -> /etc/init.d/rc4.d/S12searchd
enable service ../searchd -> /etc/init.d/rc4.d/K11searchd
enable service ../searchd -> /etc/init.d/rc5.d/S12searchd
enable service ../searchd -> /etc/init.d/rc5.d/K11searchd

Code (markup):

Now searchd *should* start on it's own when you reboot your server.

Go ahead and start the searchd daemon by running the /etc/init.d/searchd start command. If all went as planned, you should be good to go now!

 

Yeah, why?