Wednesday, May 13, 2009

Journey with Thinking Sphinx and Crond

This is my journey through time :)

Environment:
Ruby => 1.8.7-72
Rails => 2.3.2
Thinking-sphinx => 1.1.3


I had a server running thinking-sphinx through crontab but noticed that this was not working so I started doing some debugging to see what was causing the non running thinking-sphinx:index task...

First I Changed crontab to have full path like so: (crontab -e)

*/10 * * * * cd /rails/current && RAILS_ENV=production /usr/local/bin/rake thinking_sphinx:index >> /dev/null 2>&1
This did nothing... Then I changed the output to go to a file to see if this would give me something

*/10 * * * * cd /rails/current && RAILS_ENV=production /usr/local/bin/rake thinking_sphinx:index >> /tmp/sphinx.output 2>&1
This gave me a timestamp ??? Running that exact command from the shell gives me a full reindex without any issues

Then I figured maybe I needed a trace so I moved the cron task to /etc/cron.d/thinking-sphinx.ct and put this in the file

*/10 * * * * cd /rails/current && RAILS_ENV=production /usr/local/bin/rake thinking_sphinx:index --trace >> /tmp/sphinx.output 2>&1
AND THERE IT WAS !!

!!! The bundled mysql.rb driver has been removed from Rails 2.2. Please install the mysql gem and try again: gem install mysql.
Damn I should have know. So its a PATH issue when running rake under cron... Here is the latest /etc/cron.d/thinking-sphinx.ct I have that is now WORKING!!

# ------------- minute (0 - 59)
# | ----------- hour (0 - 23)
# | | --------- day of month (1 - 31)
# | | | ------- month (1 - 12)
# | | | | ----- day of week (0 - 6) (Sunday=0)
# | | | | |
# * * * * * command to be executed

PATH=/usr/local/mysql/bin:/usr/kerberos/sbin:/usr/kerberos/bin:/sbin:/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/root/bin
SHELL=/bin/bash
RAILS_ENV="production"
LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/local/mysql/lib:${LD_LIBRARY_PATH}


# re-index production sphinx every 15 minutes
*/10 * * * * root cd /rails/current && /usr/local/bin/rake thinking_sphinx:index >> /dev/null 2>&1

There are two important settings there setting the PATH with ruby/rakes install path and MySQLs install path. But also the LD_LIBRARY_PATH so that rails can find the MySQL library. I have that set in /etc/profile.d/mysql.sh but cron does not load the profile.

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