This book will serve as a guide to everything that you need to know about running a Sphinx Search Engine. In today's world, search is an integral part of any application; a reliable search engine like Sphinx Search can be the difference between running a successful and unsuccessful business. What good is being on the web if no one knows you are there? It's easy to build a proficient search engine, with Sphinx Search: Beginners Guide at hand.
Chapter 1, Setting Up Sphinx is an introduction to Sphinx. It guides the reader through the installation process for Sphinx on all major operating systems.
Chapter 2, Getting Started demonstrates some basic usage of Sphinx in order to test its installation. It also discusses full-text search and gives the reader an overview of Sphinx.
Chapter 3, Indexing teaches the reader how to create indexes. It introduces and explains the different types of datasources, and also discusses different types of attributes that can comprise an index.
Chapter 4, Searching teaches the reader how to use the Sphinx Client API to search indexes from within PHP applications. It shows the reader how to use the PHP implementation of the Sphinx Client API.
Chapter 5, Feed Search creates an application that fetches feed items and creates a Sphinx index. This index is then searched from a PHP application. It also introduces delta indexes and live index merging.
Chapter 6, Property Search creates a real world real estate portal where the user can add a property listing and specify different attributes for it so that you can search for properties based on specific criteria. Some advanced search techniques using a client API are discussed in this chapter.
Chapter 7, Sphinx Configuration discusses all commonly used configuration settings for Sphinx. It teaches the reader how to configure Sphinx in a distributed environment where indexes are kept on multiple machines.
Chapter 8, What Next? discusses some new features introduced in the recent Sphinx release. It also shows the reader how a Sphinx index can be searched using a MySQL client library. Lastly, it discusses the scenarios where Sphinx can be used and mentions some of the popular Web applications that are powered by a Sphinx search engine.
This book is for developers who are new to Sphinx Search. All code examples use PHP but the underlying logic is the same for any other web scripting language.
In this book, you will find several headings appearing frequently.
To give clear instructions of how to complete a procedure or task, we use:
1. Action 1
2. Action 2
3. Action 3
Instructions often need some extra explanation so that they make sense, so they are followed with:
This heading explains the working of tasks or instructions that you have just completed.
You will also find some other learning aids in the book, including:
These are short multiple choice questions intended to help you test your own understanding.
These set practical challenges and give you ideas for experimenting with what you have learned.
You will also find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text are shown as follows: "We can include other contexts through the use of the include directive."
A block of code is set as follows:
# searchd options (used by search daemon)
searchd
{
listen = 9312
log = /usr/local/sphinx/var/log/searchd.log
query_log = /usr/local/sphinx/var/log/query.log
max_children = 30
pid_file = /usr/local/sphinx/var/log/searchd.pid
}
When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:
source blog {
# source options
}
index posts {
# index options
}
Any command-line input or output is written as follows:
$ mkdir /path/to/your/webroot/sphinxNew terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "clicking on the Next button moves you to the next screen".
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