Upgrading § Thinking Sphinx

Upgrading Thinking Sphinx

Thinking Sphinx has changed quite a bit over time, and if you’re upgrading from an old version, you may find some of your code needs to be changed as well. Here’s a few tips…

Checking the version number

In later versions of Thinking Sphinx, there is a rake task available to check your version:

rake thinking_sphinx:version

If you’re using an older version of Thinking Sphinx as a gem, then just look at the gem version number. If you’ve got it installed as a plugin, though, then you’re going to have to have a look at vendor/plugins/thinking_sphinx/lib/thinking_sphinx.rb, as that’s where the version number was stored.

Upgrading from 2.0.0.rc2 to 2.0.0 or 1.3.20 to 1.4.0

In previous versions of Thinking Sphinx, it was valid to put attribute filters in either :with or :conditions. For a long while, filters in :conditions has been clearly flagged as deprecated, and since 1.4.0 and 2.0.0 it is now removed.

You can still use :with for attribute filters and :conditions for field-focused queries.

Upgrading from between 1.3.6 and 1.3.17

If you’re using excerpts, for this set of versions they were automatically HTML-escaped. This is now no longer the case, as Sphinx can take care of this automatically for both indexing and excerpts. Just turn on the html_strip value in your sphinx.yml file:

html_strip: true

Upgrading from between 1.3.3 and 1.3.7

You no longer have to specify an explicit Sphinx version when requiring Thinking Sphinx – it will figure it out itself. So, you can remove the version require statement from your Rakefile, and remove the version suffix in your gem setup in environment.rb.

Upgrading from 1.3.2 or earlier (when using Sphinx 0.9.9)

If you’ve been using the sphinx-0.9.9 branch from GitHub or the thinking-sphinx-099 gem, there is now just one version of Thinking Sphinx that works for both versions (and automatically detects which version you have). The installation page provides a good overview of the new setup.

config.gem(
  'thinking-sphinx',
  :lib     => 'thinking_sphinx',
  :version => '1.3.8'
)

Upgrading from 1.2.13 or earlier

With the advent of Thinking Sphinx 1.3.0, the delayed and datetime delta approaches are now in separate gems. Also, Delayed Job is no longer vendored in Thinking Sphinx, so you may need to install it as a plugin as well.

The delta page has been updated to reflect these changes, so have a read through that to figure out how to make sure your application will still work.

If you’re not using deltas, or only using the default delta approach, then this change does not affect you.

Upgrading from 1.1.17 or earlier

In versions of Thinking Sphinx before 1.1.18, the morphology/stemmer defaulted to stem_en (English). Obviously, not every website uses the English language, so this setting has been removed, with no stemmer as the default.

If you would like to keep stem_en as your stemmer, you’ll need to add it to your config/sphinx.yml file:

development:
  morphology: stem_en
test:
  morphology: stem_en
production:
  morphology: stem_en

To get a better understanding of stemmers, I recommend reading Sphinx’s documentation.

Thinking Sphinx