I’m back in the Ruby on Rails game after a long hiatus and my, things have changed a lot. And they’ve changed for the better. The application I’m working on, like many other web applications, requires an internal search feature. Sphinx was very reliable for me in the past, however, it seems that ultrasphinx and acts_as_sphinx has been replaced with a better Rails plugin, Thinking Sphinx. Getting started was super easy. After installing Sphinx and setting up the Thinking Sphinx gem (version 2.0.11) in my application’s Gemfile, I was ready to get started.

But, I ran into a problem. The platform I’m building leverages a Rails Engine to implement most of the application’s functionality. Thinking Sphinx wasn’t setting up any models to index, even though I had defined them. Turns out, that if you don’t define your models in a typical path that Thinking Sphinx is looking at, i.e. app/models, then you’re in trouble. However, after a bunch of searching, I found the solution to my problem. Create an initializer sphinx.rb in your config/initializers directory of your application. To it, add:

module ThinkingSphinx
  class Context
    def load_models
      MyModule::MyClass
    end
  end
end

I defined my models in a sub-folder of app/models and put them in a module, so hence the MyModule::MyClass. This explicitly tells Thinking Sphinx which models to load. Running rake thinking_sphinx:config after that change set up the sphinx config file as I expected it would. Then I ran thinking_sphinx:inde and I was off and running. Jumping into the rails console, I was able to verify that searching worked as expected. Hope that helps!