Using Thinking Sphinx with Rails 3

Not much has changed - it’s really just installation that is a little different.

Installing via Bundler (as a Gem)

The 2.x releases of Thinking Sphinx will only support Rails 3 - not Rails 2 or earlier. So be careful with managing gem dependencies across multiple Rails versions. It may be worth looking at RVM.

In your Gemfile, you’ll need to add the following:

  
gem ‘thinking-sphinx’, ‘2.0.10’

Of course, you can point directly to the Git repository if you so desire

  • just make sure you’re referencing a commit (probably the most recent) from the master branch:
  
gem ‘thinking-sphinx’,  
 :git => ‘git://github.com/pat/thinking-sphinx.git’,  
 :ref => ‘8f0e34b4a68494738d8dd5a1cb6bcf379adbf640’

You do not need to put the extra require statement in your Rakefile

  • Rails 3 can determine this automatically (well, when Thinking Sphinx tells it to).

Installing as a Plugin

Things are even simpler if you want Thinking Sphinx installed as a plugin, instead of managed by Bundler - just run the following shell command from within your Rails app:

  
script/rails plugin install \\  
 git://github.com/pat/thinking-sphinx.git

I don’t recommend this option though - I think it’s best to keep all dependencies in one place, and with Rails 3, the Gemfile is that one place.