Balanced Braces

It’s late and I’m pretty damn sleepy so I’ll just do this in quick lists. Today I was trying to install Sphinx on my local machine, a Macbook Pro. I’m using MAMP 1.9 to dev a new project which will involve Sphinx. However, installing Sphinx turned out to be kind of a pain in the ass. Just as a note, my laptop wasn’t running mysql to begin with.

The problem occurred when trying to install Sphinx (latest stable version – 0.9.9) with mysql support. Apparently MAMP 1.9 doesn’t come with all the mysql files that Sphinx needs to install with mysql support. Doing ./configure on Sphinx just kept leading to dead ends and a message asking me to install the mysql-devel package or explicitly specify MySQL library folders and such and specifying various folders inside of MAMP didn’t turn out well.

Now I’m sure there’s a more ‘ninja’ way to do this but this is what worked for me:

• Install MySQL. Download the DMG from http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/mysql/. Make sure to download the correct one (32-bit vs. 64-bit). After that it’s a surprisingly simple install. You don’t need to start the service or install the MySQLStartupItem.pkg.
• After that, ./configure on sphinx worked just fine since MySQL and all the various files are in all the standard locations. Make sure to include the path to install to via the –prefix option. The typical Sphinx installation usually goes in /usr/local/sphinx/ so: ./configure –prefix=/usr/local/sphinx
• Now do make and sudo make install
• Everything else is fairly straightforward.

Some extra notes:

• When configuring your sphinx.conf file, make sure to set sql_sock = /Applications/MAMP/tmp/mysql/mysql.sock when editing your sources. Also don’t forget to specify the right port (MAMP defaults to 8889 for MySQL).
• Not sure why but it kept trying to look for sphinx.conf in /usr/local/etc/sphinx.conf so when running indexer or search I would have to explicitly specify the location of the sphinx.conf file.
• If you get permission errors when doing indexer it’s probably because you forgot to sudo.

Drop me a comment if this helped you any or if you have other questions!