Sphinx part 1 - basic installation and config

Long time no see ;) I was quite busy at work and in free time I learn about one awsome thing called sphinx search server http://sphinxsearch.com/
Starting from now , next few post gonna by about sphinx.It's pretty awesome full-text search engine.
I'm only gonna said that on table containing ~40 milion record (with partitions, right indexing and so on) classic mysql full-text search last about 10-15s. When I do this with sphinx it's less than 1s :)
So let's get started ;)
At first I'm gonna show how to install sphinx on Ubuntu/Debian and check is it running properly.

1. Installation:

apt-get install sphinxsearch

and that's why I love ubuntu : D


2. Basic elements
Ok, so before we start the party, few words to remember

indexer – a tool for indexing our data sources
searchd - deamon responsible for searching data
search – a command line tool for searching data
searchapi – api for programming languages (in this tutorial we gonna focus on php)

Ok so when we're ready let's see the config file

vim /etc/sphinxsearch/sphinx.conf

 source test_src
{ 
    type            = mysql 
    sql_host        = localhost 
    sql_user        = myuser 
    sql_pass        = mypass 
    sql_db          = database_name 

    sql_query =  select id,name from history

} 


index index_test
{ 
    source              = test_src
    path                = /var/lib/sphinxsearch/data/index_test
    docinfo             = extern 
    charset_type        = utf-8 
} 

indexer 
{ 
    mem_limit       = 32M 
} 


searchd 
{ 
        port = 3312 
        log  = /var/log/searchd/searchd.log 
        query_log = /var/log/searchd/query.log 
        pid_file = /var/log/searchd/searchd.pid 
} 

The typical config contains four parts (search,search,index,indexer).
The source,index and indexer are required.
Fileds in source and index par are quite intuitive and should not cause problems.
sql_query defines the query that will give data to our source
docinfo defines how exactly docinfo will be physically stored on disk and RAM
In next part I will show how to prepare basic config and start sphinx deamon.