sphinxsearch-v3-install

Contains several helper-config files to make it easier to install and run SphinxSearch v3+.

Repository doesn't contain Docker files or other ways to run search engine inside container.

I strongly recommend to use https://manticoresearch.com/ engine as an alternative to SphinxSearch due to available source code, APT/YUM repos and Windows installer, more features, more stable.

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When your /var/run folder is located on tmpfs file system (ex: ubuntu/debian with systemd), it is often a surprise when your created folders in /var/run disappear after the system reboot.

So below is an example to install SphinxSearch v3.5+ on such OS.

1. Get desired version from http://sphinxsearch.com

wget http://sphinxsearch.com/files/sphinx-3.5.1-(XXX-some-hash-XXX)-linux-amd64.tar.gz

You version hash will be different from my one.

2. Create user

useradd -r -U -c 'Sphinxsearch system user' sphinx

3. Unarchive repo contents

You'll get something like this as directory structure:

sphinx-3.5.1
├── api
│   └── ...
├── bin
│   ├── indexer
│   ├── indextool
│   ├── searchd
│   └── wordbreaker
├── doc
│   └── ...
├── etc
│   ├── example.sql
│   ├── sphinx-min.conf.dist
│   └── sphinx.conf.dist
├── misc
│   └── ...
└── src
    └── ...

We are interested in ./bin folder contents only. Just copy ./bin files into your /usr/bin folder.

cp sphinx-3.5.1/bin/* /usr/bin

Test that searchd - SphinxSearch daemon binary now exists in your system

whereis searchd

You'll get

searchd: /usr/bin/searchd

4. Configure our installation

I have my own example config, you may take yours.

First - create paths we need to store indexes, config files, logs and etc.

mkdir -p /etc/sphinx /var/run/sphinx /var/log/sphinx /var/lib/sphinx/data

Let our created sphinx user to deal with new paths.

chown -R sphinx:sphinx /etc/sphinx /var/run/sphinx /var/log/sphinx /var/lib/sphinx

Move config files from this repository /etc folder to their places.

General config:

/etc/sphinx/sphinx.conf

Systemd service file:

/etc/systemd/system/sphinx.service

File, indicating our OS to restore /var/run/sphinx folder with write permissions for sphinx user:

/usr/lib/tmpfiles.d/sphinx.conf

5. Enable systemd service Enter this to enable system service:

systemctl enable sphinx

You'll get something like:

Created symlink /etc/systemd/system/sphinx.service → /lib/systemd/system/sphinx.service.

5. Start the service

Now you can start SphinxSearch daemon as

systemctl start sphinx

6.Check installation

To check the service you can use:

ps ax | grep searchd

results in similar output:

  3744 ?        S      0:00 /usr/bin/searchd --config /etc/sphinx/sphinx.conf
  3746 ?        Sl     0:00 /usr/bin/searchd --config /etc/sphinx/sphinx.conf

SphinxSearch supports connections via mysql-like interface, so to perform additional checks we need:

Note: for this check you'll have to install mysql-client library (ex: mysql-client-core-8.0)

mysql -uroot -h 127.0.0.1 -P 9306

Port 9306 is the port you selected in searchd section of your sphinx.conf file under parameter listen

In opened console you can see that SphinxSearch created our test news index

mysql> show tables;
+-------+------+
| Index | Type |
+-------+------+
| news  | rt   |
+-------+------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

Reboot your system/virtual machine and see the service running.

To stop running search engine use

systemctl stop sphinx