Sphinxsearch is believed to be the fastest search engine. It is very much useful for large websites. In this post, implementation of sphinxsearch in phpBB forum is described.

Sphinxsearch can only be installed in a Nginx server. Apache users can not have this search engine right now.

Installation

To install Sphinxsear in a Ubuntu server, run the following command:-

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install sphinxsearch

Creating Working Directories

Run this:

sudo mkdir -p /var/www/sphinx
sudo mkdir -p /var/www/sphinx/log

Goto ACP of phpBB

From Administrative Control Panel of phpBB, goto search setting and select Sphinx Fulltext Search.

Now copy the automatically generated content for sphinx.conf file. Now click Submit.

Configuration

Run this command:

sudo nano /etc/sphinxsearch/sphinx.conf

Paste the content here which has been copied in previous post.

Remember to change the following only:-

sql_user = username
sql_pass = password

N.B: If you have forgotten the username and password, then download config.php from the forum root folder through ftp software.

Goto ACP of phpBB again

Click Maintenance->Search index. Click create index under Sphinx Fulltext.

Indexing, Crontab

Now you have to run the following commands sequentially.

Index:-

indexer --config /etc/sphinxsearch/sphinx.conf index_phpbb_e2325eXXXXXXXXXX_main >> /var/www/sphinx/log/indexer.log 2>&1 &

indexer --config /etc/sphinxsearch/sphinx.conf index_phpbb_e2325eXXXXXXXXXX_delta >> /var/www/sphinx/log/indexer.log 2>&1 &

indexer --rotate --config /etc/sphinxsearch/sphinx.conf index_phpbb_e2325eXXXXXXXXXX_delta >> /var/www/sphinx/log/indexer.log 2>&1 &

searchd --config /etc/sphinxsearch/sphinx.conf >> /var/www/sphinx/log/searchd-startup.log 2>&1 &

Crontab:-

crontab -e

Add the following line at the end of the file.

0 3 * * * indexer --rotate --config /etc/sphinxsearch/sphinx.conf index_phpbb_e2325eXXXXXXXXXX_main >> /var/www/sphinx/log/indexer.log 2>&1 &

You are done.