Up until today I was using the version of Sphinx provided by MacPorts, 0.9.8, as a lot of developers probably are. It installed painlessly, but I’m in the process of auditioning several different search engine options for a project and I wanted to make sure I was using the latest in my comparisons. I’m also using a PostgreSQL 8.3 database, which requires specifying a few additional options to configure.

Here are the commands I used to install Sphinx 0.9.9RC1 (run inside the Sphinx source directory after you download it):

export LDFLAGS="-L/usr/lib"
./configure --with-pgsql --with-pgsql-includes=/opt/local/include/postgresql83/ \
    --with-pgsql-libs=/opt/local/lib/postgresql83/
make
sudo make install

The first line ensures that make can find the system iconv libraries. Otherwise, it’s a pretty straight forward process.

Update

A simpler solution is to make sure that the pg_config executable can be found on your path. Add /opt/local/lib/postgresql83/bin/ to your path, and then you can simply use:

export LDFLAGS="-L/usr/lib"
./configure --with-pgsql
make
sudo make install

1 Response to “Building Sphinx 0.9.9RC1 with PostgreSQL 8.3 support via MacPorts on Mac OS 10.5”

  1. Allen Fair replied on January 26th, 2009 at 01:36 PM:

    Thanks! How timely for me.

    My gotcha was: configure when mysql is not installed. I had to add the –without-mysql option to configure, and voila!

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