DokuWiki Sphinx search tutorial

Features | Screenshots | Installation | Configuration options | FAQ | Support


Description

DokuWiki Sphinx search plugin replaces DokuWiki’s built-in search functionality with the Sphinx-powered search which gives high-performance and more relevant search results.

Installation

Requirements.
To use this plugin you need to have Sphinx Search installed and PHP5 with SQLite extension (SQLite is enabled by default as of PHP 5).

Download the latest version of the plugin from Launchpad:
https://launchpad.net/dokuwiki-sphinxsearch

Follow these steps:

  1. Unpack plugin files into lib/plugins directory of your DokuWiki installation.
  2. Run Sphinx Search indexer to index your DokuWiki data for the first time. Note: you have to run it from lib/plugins/sphinxsearch directory. e.g.:
    $cd {Your_DokuWiki_Path}/lib/plugins/sphinxsearch
    $indexer -c sphinx.conf dk_main
  3. After indexer completes it’s job, run searchd, e.g.:
    $searchd -c sphinx.conf
  4. To have your search results up-to-date, setup cronjob to periodically re-index your DokuWiki data, e.g.:
    1 10 * * * root {Your_DokuWiki_Path}/lib/plugin/sphinxsearch/indexer.php

Configuration options

You can fine-tune the search behavior by editing the configuration file in conf/default.php.

  • Define custom Sphinx host, port and index name.
  • Control the way results look with maxresults, snippetsize and aroundwords which defines the excerpt sizes.
  • Control weights by setting body_priority, title_priority, pagename_priority or namespace_priority for namespace matching

FAQ

Q: I get “sh: php: not found”
A: It seems your system on this server doesn’t know where is php located.
You should specify this in sphinx.conf file (line 7), there is such line:

xmlpipe_command = php xmlall.php

you can find out php path with running such command:

$ which php

usually it’s in /usr/bin/php, so your changed line in sphinx.conf would look like:

xmlpipe_command = /usr/bin/php xmlall.php

Support

This plugin is developed by Ivinco. If you need commercial support, or if you’d like DokuWiki Sphinx Search Plugin customized for your needs, we can help. Visit plugin website for the latest news.
See release notes, report bugs and feature wishes on Launchpad: https://bugs.launchpad.net/dokuwiki-sphinxsearch

2 Comments

AndreasMay 5th, 2011 at 6:57 pm

I installed Dokuwiki at the office to have an online documentation for our Helpdesk as well as other resources available online. With the ITwiki growing in size it became clear to us that we needed to provide better search results as navigation around the wiki sidebar was simply not enough.

We had some problems implementing dokuwiki-sphinxsearch but with the great help from ivinco.com we made it happen and our users couldn’t be happier. Many thanks to the ivinco team for providing us free support. This is a great plugin and I recommend every dokuwiki user to implement this plugin to their wiki.

MarkMay 23rd, 2011 at 4:29 am

Just wanted to give a great big THANKS! to the the team at Invinco, especially Yaroslav. We have just created our very first Dokuwiki site and immediatly notice how poor the default search is.

After a little Googling we came across the sphinxsearch plugin. WOW! what a great difference it has made to our search results. I especially like how we can set the weighting on particular elements of documents so they score higher in the search results.

So any way, on top of this great plugin, I also received some amazing customer support from Yaroslav. We had some minor requirements that the plugin did not quite do. After a quick email to the Invinco team I received a prompt reply with an updated version of the plugin that did exacly what we needed.

All I can say is THANK YOU you have really impressed us. Keeps up the great work guys!

Regards
Mark

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