Thinking Sphinx

Using Rails 3? Thinking Sphinx 2 (currently a prerelease) supports Rails 3 only – here’s the lowdown on how to get it set up.

What?

A concise and easy-to-use Ruby library that connects ActiveRecord to the Sphinx search daemon, managing configuration and searching.

Why?

Sphinx is a very fast search engine that indexes data and provides flexible ways of searching it. Thinking Sphinx allows you to link up your models into Sphinx simply and painlessly -– because let’s face it, searching across multiple fields using SQL is a pain in the neck.

Where?

Read up on installing Sphinx and then Thinking Sphinx.

Who?

Pat Allan is the developer behind Thinking Sphinx, and the underlying API for Sphinx, Riddle. Many others have contributed valued patches and ideas.

Most importantly: How?

Read the quickstart guide, along with the rest of the documentation.

And when you get stuck, there’s always the google group.