An Ambitious Sphinx Adapter

I don’t know about you, but I like me some sexy full-text searching.

The basics

Want to find all meals that mention bacon?

Meal.select {'bacon'}

What about bacon bits and sour cream?

Meal.select {'bacon bits' && 'sour cream'}

Maybe with bacon in the name, or cheese in the recipe?

Meal.select {|m| m.name =~ 'bacon' || m.recipe =~ 'cheese'}

Cheese in the name, but not grilled?

Meal.select {|m| m.name =~ 'bacon' && m.name !~ 'grilled'}

Pagination

You’re going to want to use pagination. Ultrasphinx, the underlying library, only supports it, as in, you can’t just get all the objects matching your query. You have to use paging.

It’s pretty simple:

Meal.select {'bacon'}.page(2)
Meal.select {'bacon'}.page(3)

Big honking disclaimer

We’re still learning a lot about how sphinx and ambition work, so things are likely to change a lot, and features are likely to be missing.

Getting Started

Installing

sudo gem install ambitious-sphinx

Add it to your app

Require our files somewhere, like at the end of config/environment.rb, maybe create config/initializers/sphinx.rb

require 'ultrasphinx'
require 'ambition/adapters/ambitious_sphinx'

Sphinx and Ultrasphinx

You will also need to go through the motions of setting up ultrasphinx.

This includes:

* Configuring/installing sphinx
* Modifying your model to indicate what's to be indexed
* Bootstrapping ultrasphinx

All this is discussed in detail in ultrasphinx’s README

Playing with the code base

In addition to the other dependencies, you’ll need to:

gem install echoe redgreen mocha test-spec

Run the tests with:

rake test

More information on Sphinx:

-> http://www.sphinxsearch.com/
-> http://blog.evanweaver.com/articles/2007/07/09/ultrasphinx-searching-the-world-in-231-seconds/
-> http://blog.evanweaver.com/files/doc/fauna/ultrasphinx/files/README.html

More information on Ambition:

-> ambition.rubyforge.org -> groups.google.com/group/ambition-rb/