v5.6.0

Upgrading

No breaking or major changes.

New Features

• Support for Manticore 6.0 (#1242)
• sphinx-prefixed search methods, in case the standard search is overridden from something unrelated. (#1265). Existing search methods will also be respected.
• none / search_none scopes that can be chained to searches and will return no results.
• Added ThinkingSphinx::Processor#sync to synchronise updates/deletions based on a real-time index's scope, by @akostadinov in @1258.

Changes to behaviour

• Improved Rails 7.1 support, by @jdelStrother in #1252.

Fixes

• Handle both SQL and RT indices correctly for inheritance column checks, by @akostadinov in #1249.
• Ensure tests and CI work with recent Manticore versions, by @jdelStrother in #1263.
• Use rm -rf to delete test and temporary directories (instead of rm -r).

v5.5.1

Upgrading

No breaking or major changes.

Changes to behaviour

• Fixed total count of results in pagination information for Manticore 5.0+, by disabling the cutoff limit. (#1239).

v5.5.0

Upgrading

No breaking or major changes.

New Features

• ThinkingSphinx::Processor, a public interface to perform index-related operations on model instances or model name/id combinations. In collaboration with @akostadinov (#1215).

Changes to behaviour

• Confirmed support by testing against Ruby 3.1 and 3.2 by @jdelStrother (#1237).

Fixes

• Fix YAML loading, by @aepyornis (#1217).
• Further fixes for File.exist? instead of the deprecated File.exists?, by @funsim (#1221) and @graaf (1233).
• Treat unknown column errors as QueryErrors, so retrying the query occurs automatically.
• Fix MariaDB error handling.

v5.4.0

Upgrading

No breaking or major changes.

New Features

• Rails 7 support, including contributions from @anthonyshull in #1205.

Changes to behaviour

• Confirmed support by testing against Manticore 4.0 and Sphinx 3.4.

Fixes

• Include instance_exec in ThinkingSphinx::Search::CORE_METHODS by @jdelStrother in #1210.
• Use File.exist? instead of the deprecated File.exists? (#1211).

v5.3.0

Upgrading

No breaking or major changes.

Changes to behaviour

• StaleIdsExceptions now include a URL in their error message with recommendations on how to resolve the problem.
• Fire real-time callbacks on after_commit (including deletions) instead of after_save/after_destroy to ensure data is fully persisted to the database before updating Sphinx. More details in #1204.

Fixes

• Ensure Thinking Sphinx's ActiveRecord components are loaded by either Rails' after_initialise hook or ActiveSupport's on_load notification, because the order of these two events are not consistent.
• Remove app/indices from eager_load_paths in Rails 4.2 and 5, to match the behaviour in 6.

Both of these fixes are evolutions/improvements to changes introduced in v5.2.0/5.2.1.

v5.2.1

Upgrading

No breaking or major changes.

Fixes

• Ensure ActiveRecord components are loaded for rake tasks, but only after the Rails application has initialised. More details in #1199. A fix for a bug introduced in v5.2.0.

v5.2.0

Upgrading

No breaking or major changes.

New features

• Confirmed support for Ruby 3.0.
• Orphaned records in real-time indices can now be cleaned up without running rails ts:rebuild. Disabled by default, can be enabled by setting real_time_tidy to true per environment in config/thinking_sphinx.yml (and will need ts:rebuild to restructure indices upon initial deploy). More details in #1192.

Bug fixes

• Avoid loading ActiveRecord during Rails initialisation so app configuration can still have an impact (@jdelStrother in #1194).
• Remove app/indices (in both the Rails app and engines) from Rails' eager load paths, which was otherwise leading to indices being loaded more than once. (See #1191 and #1195).

v5.1.0

Upgrading

No breaking or major changes.

New features

• Support for Sphinx v3.3 and Manticore v3.5.
• Support for Rails 6.1 (via joiner v0.6.0).

Changes to behaviour

• enable_star is no longer available as a configuration option, as it's been enabled by default in Sphinx since v2.2.2, and is no longer allowed in Sphinx v3.3.1.
• All timestamp attributes are now considered plain integer values from Sphinx's perspective. Sphinx was already expecting integers, but since Sphinx v3.3.1 it doesn't recognise timestamps as a data type. There is no functional difference with this change - Thinking Sphinx was always converting times to their UNIX epoch integer values.
• Allow configuration of the maximum statement length (@kalsan in #1179).
• Respect :path values to navigate associations for Thinking Sphinx callbacks on SQL-backed indices. Discussed in #1182.

Bug fixes

• Don't attempt to update delta flags on frozen model instances.

v5.0.0

Major Features and Breaking Changes

Thinking Sphinx v5.0 has one significant change - explicit callbacks - plus drops support for old versions of Rails/Ruby/Sphinx, and adds a few other smaller improvements.

Explicit Callbacks

Previous versions of Thinking Sphinx automatically added callbacks to all ActiveRecord models, for the purpose of persisting changes back to Sphinx (whether that be inserts, updates, or deletions). And while the actual overhead for non-indexed models wasn't super slow, it's still far from ideal.

So now, you need to add callbacks yourself, to just the models you're indexing.

With SQL-backed models (defined using :with => :active_record), you'll very likely want to add one of the two following lines inside your model:

class Article < ApplicationRecord
  # If you're not using delta indices:
  ThinkingSphinx::Callbacks.append(self, :behaviours => [:sql])

  # If you *are* using delta indices:
  ThinkingSphinx::Callbacks.append(self, :behaviours => [:sql, :deltas])
end

If you're using real-time indices, you very likely already have callbacks defined in your models, but you can replace them with the new calls:

class Article < ApplicationRecord
  # Instead of this...
  after_save ThinkingSphinx::RealTime.callback_for(:article)
  # use this...
  ThinkingSphinx::Callbacks.append(self, :behaviours => [:real_time])
end

For associated models which still fire real-time callbacks, you can use the :path option with the same call:

class Comment < ApplicationRecord
  belongs_to :article

  ThinkingSphinx::Callbacks.append self,
    :behaviours => [:real_time],
    :path       => [:article]
end

And if you're using a custom block with your old real-time callback, you can pass that same block to the new approach as well:

class Article < ApplicationRecord
  ThinkingSphinx::Callbacks.append(
    self, :behaviours => [:real_time]
  ) do |instance|
    # returning an array of instances to index. You could add
    # custom logic here if you don't want indexing to happen
    # in some cases.
  end
end

At this point in time, the older callback style for real-time indices will continue to work, but it's still recommended to update your code to the new style instead.

On the off chance you are using SQL-backed indices and you have attribute_updates enabled in config/thinking_sphinx.yml, you'll want to specify that in your :behaviours option:

ThinkingSphinx::Callbacks.append(self, :behaviours => [:sql, :updates])

Sphinx 2.2.11 or newer is required

Sphinx 2.1 is no longer supported - and ideally, it's best to upgrade any 2.2.x release to 2.2.11.

Sphinx 3.x releases are supported, but there are known issues with indexing SQL-backed indices on a PostgreSQL database (real-time indices are fine though).

As part of this change, Sphinx's docinfo setting is no longer configured, so the skip_docinfo setting in config/thinking_sphinx.yml can be removed.

When it comes to Manticore as a drop-in replacement for Sphinx, we're testing against the latest 2.x and 3.x releases, which are currently 2.8.2 and 3.4.2 respectively.

Ruby 2.4 or newer is required

Versions of Ruby less than 2.3 are no longer supported, sorry. We're currently testing against 2.4 through to 2.7.

Rails 4.2 or newer is required

It's been a long time coming, but Rails 3.2 (and 4.0 and 4.1) are no longer supported. The current supported versions are 4.2 through to 6.0 (and 6.1 will likely work as well, once it's released).

Other changes to behaviour

• Remove internal uses of send, replaced with public_send as that's available in all supported Ruby versions.
• Custom index_set_class implementations can now expect the :instances option to be set alongside :classes, which is useful in cases to limit the indices returned if you're splitting index data for given classes/models into shards. (Introduced in PR #1171 after discussions with @lunaru in #1166.)
• Deletion statements are simplified by avoiding the need to calculate document keys/offsets (@njakobsen via #1134).
• Real-time data is deleted before replacing it, to avoid duplicate data when offsets change (@njakobsen via #1134).
• Use reference_name as per custom index_set_class definitions. Previously, the class method was called on ThinkingSphinx::IndexSet even if a custom subclass was configured. (As per discussions with @kalsan in #1172.)
• Fields and attributes can be overriden - whichever's defined last with a given name is the definition that's used. This is an edge case, but useful if you want to override any of the default fields/indices. (Requested by @kalsan in #1172.)

Bug fixes

None.

v4.4.1

Upgrading

No breaking or major changes.

Changes to behaviour

• Automatically remove app/indices from Zeitwerk's autoload paths in Rails 6.0 onwards (if using Zeitwerk as the autoloader).