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Does Flying Sphinx work with MongoDB or Mongoid?

Brian Armstrong

07 Nov, 2011 01:49 AM

Hi,

I'm looking for search solutions on Heroku with Mongo. I saw this gem on Github:
https://github.com/redbeard-tech/mongoid-sphinx

Just wondering if anyone has gotten something like this up and running with Flying Sphinx? Thanks!

Brian

1. Support Staff 1 Posted by Pat Allan on 07 Nov, 2011 10:47 AM

   

   Hi Brian

   At this point, it doesn't work out of the box. It should be possible to adapt the flying-sphinx gem to work with mongoid-sphinx (it currently expects thinking-sphinx) - although it's a bit different because mongoid-sphinx probably uses XML feeds instead of SQL sources to get the data into Sphinx.

   The flying-sphinx code isn't particularly large, though there's a few tricky pieces - namely, an SSH reverse port forward to allow access to Heroku database servers. Not sure of the exact setup for a Mongo equivalent, but certainly happy to provide advice and perhaps work on it with you. Right now I'm about to jump on a few long flights, so I won't be able to really investigate until the end of this week - but let me know if you want to pursue this further. In the meantime, you're certainly welcome to have a look through the flying-sphinx code:
   https://github.com/flying-sphinx/flying-sphinx

   Cheers

   Pat

2. 2 Posted by Brian Armstrong on 07 Nov, 2011 07:37 PM

   

   Awesome, thanks Pat! Will let you know if I get a chance to dig in a take a look.

   In general, thanks for getting a sphinx solution up on Heroku! Long overdue, and very awesome. Have a great trip.

3. Support Staff 3 Posted by Pat Allan on 08 Nov, 2011 11:41 AM

   

   Thanks Brian - in case I have some time in the near future, what Mongo service are you using?

   Pat

4. 4 Posted by Brian D. Armstr... on 09 Nov, 2011 01:14 AM

   

   MongoLab on Heroku. With the Mongoid gem. Would be awesome.

   In case others come across this, I was able to hack something together with
   the https://github.com/jugyo/sunspot_mongoid gem and the Websolr add-on for
   heroku. So it's not like there are zero options, but I prefer Sphinx so
   would be cool to see that as an option as well. Just wanted to add that in
   case others were stuck.

   Thanks for your help Pat!

5. 5 Posted by Marshall Alexan... on 29 Feb, 2012 09:00 PM

   

   Hey guys,

   Was there any update to this? We'll be moving a mongosphinx app to heroku soon and would love to find a sphinx hosting company that we could use (otherwise I'll probably spin up an EC2 instance just for sphinx until one becomes availale)..

   Thanks,
   -marshall

   PS: This particular app uses mongohq and mongoid, but we use mongolab elsewhere and would be up for switching if somehow it made a difference.

6. Support Staff 6 Posted by Pat Allan on 29 Feb, 2012 11:17 PM

   

   Hi Marshall

   I'm keen to support Mongo, but I've not used it at all. Just reading through the mongosphinx README, seems it's all pretty manual. The main difficulty will be sending the indexing rake task output through to Sphinx on the Flying Sphinx server.

   Are you using a specific fork of mongosphinx? The official repo/gem hasn't been updated in a few years.

   Pat