[question]: Tasks are relying on a local daemon?

[alexanderadam]

Hi Pat,

so first of all: thank you for your work!

I just have a small question: So thinking sphinx supports remote daemons which is great if you want to use Sphinx in a Docker container. But it seems that most of the tasks are relying on a locally running daemon including stuff like rebuilding real-time indices (ts:rt:index).

Are such things simply not possible and/or needed when the daemon runs on another machine?

[pat]

Hi @alexanderadam :)

You're pretty much correct in your assumption - almost all tasks must be run locally.

• ts:start, ts:stop, and ts:restart all need to call Sphinx's searchd executable.
• ts:configure needs to save the configuration file in a location that Sphinx can access (thus, local file system)
• ts:sql:index needs to call Sphinx's indexer executable.
• ts:clear deletes existing index files (local file system).
• ts:rebuild calls all of the above, and thus must also be run with a local Sphinx.

The one exception, really, is ts:rt:index - because that's just sending data to an already-running Sphinx daemon. Of course, if you're running ts:rebuild, it'll call that task for you as well, but it'll also call all the other tasks. So ts:rt:index will only work if you're calling just that task remotely, and the rest locally.

Sphinx has no way to interact with the daemon state remotely - so if you do want to run remote daemons, you'll still need a copy of your Rails app on the Sphinx server/container, and for that to be able to talk to your database.

[alexanderadam]

Thank you @pat, for responding so fast! So what is the usual workflow for using TS with a Sphinx container? Do you have any recommendation?

[pat]

To be honest, I'm not entirely sure of the flow - I've not used Docker much myself, and never with Sphinx. However, others have shared their attempts and approaches in #1010 and #1131, so I'd highly recommend reading those issue threads :)

[alexanderadam]

Awesome, thank you and have a wonderful day!