Sphincter is a ActiveRecord extension for full-text searching using the Sphinx library.

For the quick-start guide and some examples, see README.txt.

Installing

Download and install Sphinx from www.sphinxsearch.com/downloads.html

Download Sphinx Ruby API from rubyforge.org/frs/?group_id=2604&release_id=11049

Unpack Sphinx Ruby API into vendor/plugins/.

Install the gem:

  gem install Sphincter

Require Sphincter in config/environment.rb:

  require 'sphincter'

Require the Sphincter rake tasks in Rakefile:

  require 'sphincter/tasks'

Setup

At best, you don‘t do anything to setup Sphincter. It has sensible built-in defaults.

If you‘re running Sphinx‘s searchd for multiple environments on the same machine, you‘ll want to add a config file to change the port that searchd and the RAILS_ENV will comminicate across. Do that in a per-environment configuration file.

If you have multiple machines, you‘ll want to change which address searchd will run on. Do that in the global configuration file.

See Sphincter::Configure for full information on how to setup these and other options for Sphincter.

When you‘re done, run:

 $ rake sphincter:configure

Indexing

Sphincter automatically extends ActiveRecord::Base with Sphincter::Search, so you only have to call add_index in the models you want indexed:

  class Model < ActiveRecord::Base
    belongs_to :other

    add_index :fields => %w[title body]
  end

  class Other < ActiveRecord::Base
    has_many :models
  end

add_index automatically adds a search method to has_many associations referencing this model, so you could:

  Other.find(id).models.search 'some query'

See Sphincter::Search for details.

When you‘re done, run:

  rake sphincter:index

Tasks

You can get a set of Sphincter tasks by requiring ‘sphincter/tasks’ in your Rakefile. These tasks are all in the ‘sphincter’ namespace: