Restarting Sphinx with a new conf file

Resetting the Sphinx search daemon to change the index it runs against is a multi step process.

1. Of course you need to either edit the existing .conf file or create a fresh one that contains the new data source and index information.

2. The search daemon process should be killed.

3. The new index should be created:

./indexer --config /path/to/conf/sphinx.conf --all

4. Restart the search daemon

./searchd -c /directory/to/config/file/sphinx.conf

Sphinx: Unknown local index error

One possible source of the unknown local index error generated by Sphinx is a mismatch in the index definition section. It seems as if the name of the index must be the same as the destination name of the path to the index.

So if the index is defined as

#############################################################################
## index definition
#############################################################################

# local index example
#
# this is an index which is stored locally in the filesystem
#
# all indexing-time options (such as morphology and charsets)
# are configured per local index

index musicReviews {


Then the path should be:

path = /path/to/index/data/musicReviews