Jaikoo Thinking Sphinx for Merb... And Rails

Thinking Sphinx for Merb... And Rails

Update 2008-04-17
Pat’s integrated my changes and also removed the horrible double Rake task hack I did. Now the Rake task works automatically. I’ve removed my branch and now I mirror Pat’s master branch. Please use Pat’s branch instead as his one will always be the most up to date.

It started off this morning before breakfast when I wanted to get Pat’s excellent Thinking Sphinx plugin going in Merb. The next thing I know, it was all done with enough time to spare for some tea. However my first attempt I made was too tightly coupled with Merb when it didn’t need to be. So tonight I cleaned it up and now it’s flexible enough to be used on both Merb and Rails apps.

My experiment can be found here but I warn you to tread with care as it’s still work in progress. However it works quite well for me as we use both Rails and Merb at work. The gem is based on Thinking Sphinx trunk so please read that first if you have any problems.

To get going:


git clone git://github.com/jaikoo/thinking-sphinx.git

cd thinking-sphinx

rake package

sudo gem install pkg/thinking-sphinx.0.8.0.gem

In your Merb app add the following:


init.rb:
dependency 'thinking_sphinx'

Rakefile
require 'thinking_sphinx/tasks/merb

For your Rails app:


Create an file called search.rb in your iniitializers dir and insert:
require 'thinking_sphinx'

Add a file called thinking_sphinx.rake in lib/tasks and add:
require 'thinking_sphinx/tasks/rails

Then do the usual Thinking Sphinx setup such as adding the index info to your models, rake thinking_sphinx:configure, rake ts:index etc…

Thanks again to Pat Allan for creating such a well designed and abstracted Sphinx plugin.

Future? I’m eyeing up adding DataMapper support which I’m quite excited about… Hopefully I’ll get sometime in the next few days to work on this.

Update Pat announced the release of his re-write of the Thinking Sphinx plugin. Check it out here !

4 Responses to “Thinking Sphinx for Merb... And Rails”

jney Graciously said:
Nice, a full text search plugin for Merb. But i got an error while building the package (rake package) : ** README.txt is in the wrong format for auto-intuiting. run sow blah and look at it's text files rake aborted! Don't know how to build task 'lib/thinking_sphinx/tasks/merb_ts_tasks.rb'
April 10th, 2008 at 01:25 PM

Jonathan Conway Graciously said:
Sorry about that, can you do a pull and try it again. I forgot to push an updated to the manifest. Cheers Jonthan
April 10th, 2008 at 06:25 PM

Jonathan Conway Graciously said:
Also, when you rebuild the package it's best to delete all of the contents of the pkg dir otherwise you may can an error telling you to run sow.
April 10th, 2008 at 06:27 PM

jney Graciously said:
Great it just work nice. great work from you and pat allan.
April 12th, 2008 at 09:27 PM

Comment on this article

Search

Twitter

While I love what they've done, it feels like 'Edge Case' software http://www.themattinator.com -
@MoTalking Is it in shades of green;?;) -
my mac's crawling a long this morning -
testing out javarebel's auto class reloading -
Show me the whale! Show me the whale! Show me the whale! -
@alanb :D -
Sun still pushing their cert bollox spam at me. I'm a Sun cert engineer and architect from the old days. Utter useless crap. -
Loving the rain.. First time in days I haven't sat trying to claw my eyes out with hay fever -
@alanb yep, strange but true:) -
@alanb most Brother printers have excellent Mac support, plus they're cheap and very reliable compared to my old samsung -
WTF?! I ran out of noodles! -
Maven appears not to suck as much as it used to -
This is bloody cool! http://tinyurl.com/55h3oc -
@fuzzy_orange ha! dude it's not like we're at college when we used to do 5 day non stop coding binges.. Sleep more and get more work done;) -
functional programming for a disfunctional guy -
@MoTalking Yeh, house prices down 6.3% from what they were a year ago -
@fuzzy_orange Get yourself checked out mate.. Sounds like a health problem. -
@jamieparkins Don't tease... I'm making a mockup of the iPhone 2.0 from milk bottles as I speak.. -
Office move occurs on new iPhone day! -
@fearoffish good luck matey -

About

Online journal of Jonathan Conway a twenty something technologist, entrepreneur, husband, daddy of two, oh and lead architect at vzaar. Currently residing in London, UK.

You can find a little bit more about me here

Contact me at