ThinkingSphinx Capistrano Tasks

Each of these currently gets run in your production environment except for the thinking_sphinx:install tasks. I’m sure a patch would be welcome to make this work across any environment.

Adding the new Capistrano tasks to your Rails app

If you’ve got ThinkingSphinx installed as a plugin, add this to the top of your config/deploy.rb file:

If you’re using the Plugin:

load ‘vendor/plugins/thinking-sphinx/lib/thinking_sphinx/deploy/capistrano’

If you’re using the Gem:

require 'thinking_sphinx/deploy/capistrano

Also, at the bottom of the file, add the following line:

after "deploy:setup", "thinking_sphinx:shared_sphinx_folder"

Using ‘cap thinking_sphinx:shared_sphinx_folder’

I have not personally run across any issues using symlinks, but some people have. Plus, using a symlink can make you go through extra steps during deployment. Now, there’s a new setting you can add to your config/sphinx.yml file to specify the full path to your Sphinx database files like so:

production:
  searchd_file_path: "/path/to/your/app/db/sphinx/production/"

This path will get automatically created if it does not exist.

Updated Method of Deploying a Rails app with ThinkingSphinx

Having a constant path to the Sphinx indexes means you really don’t have to do anything special on deployment assuming it’s already running. If your define_index block in any models are changing frequently, you can add a few lines so you don’t forget about re-indexing. Check out my revised deploy.rb file for details.

Updated deploy.rb file

My updated sample deploy.rb is pastied.

NOTE: Please see this updated post for more recent info on deploying your apps with Thinking Sphinx.

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