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

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+ on such OS.

1. Get latest distribution from http://sphinxsearch.com

wget http://sphinxsearch.com/files/sphinx-3.1.1-XXXX-linux-amd64.tar.gz

You XXXX version hash will be different from my one.

2. Create user to run SphinxSearch

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

3. Unarchive repo contents in folder

You'll get something like this as directory structure:

sphinx-3.1.1
├── 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-3.1.1/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:

/lib/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'l 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

service sphinx start

6.Check installation

To check the service you can use:

ps ax | grep searchd

  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 check we need:

mysql -uroot -h 127.0.0.1 -P 9306

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

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 the system/virtual machine and see the service running.