Rake Tasks

Indexing

To index your data, you can run the following rake task:

rake thinking_sphinx:index

There is also abbreviated versions, to save your fingers the few extra keystrokes:

rake ts:index
rake ts:in

The output of this task will look roughly like this:

Generating Configuration to \
  /path/to/RAILS_ROOT/config/development.sphinx.conf
indexer --config /path/to/RAILS_ROOT/config/development.sphinx.conf \
  --all
Sphinx 0.9.8-release (r1371)
Copyright (c) 2001-2008, Andrew Aksyonoff

using config file \
  '/path/to/RAILS_ROOT/config/development.sphinx.conf'...
indexing index 'article_core'...
collected 10 docs, 0.0 MB
collected 0 attr values
sorted 0.0 Mvalues, 100.0% done
sorted 0.0 Mhits, 100.0% done
total 10 docs, 142 bytes
total 0.101 sec, 1407.21 bytes/sec, 99.10 docs/sec
indexing index 'article_delta'...
collected 0 docs, 0.0 MB
collected 0 attr values
sorted 0.0 Mvalues, nan% done
total 0 docs, 0 bytes
total 0.010 sec, 0.00 bytes/sec, 0.00 docs/sec
distributed index 'article' can not be directly indexed; skipping.

This task, run normally, will also generate the configuration file for Sphinx. If you decide to make custom changes, then you can disable this generation running reindex instead.

rake thinking_sphinx:reindex

If you’re using a version of Thinking Sphinx older than 1.3.10, then reindex doesn’t exist, but you can do the same thing by setting the INDEX_ONLY environment variable to true:

rake thinking_sphinx:index INDEX_ONLY=true

Generating the Configuration File

If you need to just generate the configuration file, without indexing (something that can be useful when deploying), here’s the task (and shortcuts) to do it:

rake thinking_sphinx:configure
rake ts:conf
rake ts:config

Expected output:

Generating Configuration to \
  /path/to/RAILS_ROOT/config/development.sphinx.conf

Starting and Stopping Sphinx

If you actually want to search against the indexed data, then you’ll need Sphinx’s searchd daemon to be running. This can be controlled using the following tasks:

rake thinking_sphinx:start
rake ts:start
rake thinking_sphinx:stop
rake ts:stop

Expected outputs:

searchd --pidfile --config \
  /path/to/RAILS_ROOT/config/development.sphinx.conf
Sphinx 0.9.8-release (r1371)
Copyright (c) 2001-2008, Andrew Aksyonoff

using config file \
  '/path/to/RAILS_ROOT/config/development.sphinx.conf'...
Started successfully (pid 12928).
Sphinx 0.9.8-release (r1371)
Copyright (c) 2001-2008, Andrew Aksyonoff

using config file \
  '/path/to/RAILS_ROOT/config/development.sphinx.conf'...
stop: succesfully sent SIGTERM to pid 12928
Stopped search daemon (pid 12928).

Rebuilding Sphinx Indexes

When you make changes to your Sphinx index structure, you will need to stop and start Sphinx for these changes to take effect, as well as re-index the data. This is all wrapped up into a single task:

rake thinking_sphinx:rebuild
rake ts:rebuild

Handling Delta Indexes

If you’re using either the Delayed Job or Datetime/Timestamp delta approaches, you’ll need to run a task to manage the indexing. For the Delayed Job setup, the rake task runs constantly, processing any delta jobs (as well as any other normal jobs if you’re using the delayed_job plugin elsewhere in your application).

rake thinking_sphinx:delayed_delta
rake ts:dd

For those using Datetime Deltas, you’ll need to run the following task at a regular interval – whatever your threshold is set to.

rake thinking_sphinx:index:delta
rake ts:in:delta

Checking your version of Thinking Sphinx

There is also a rake task for outputting the version of Thinking Sphinx you’re using.

rake thinking_sphinx:version
rake ts:version
Thinking Sphinx v1.1.16