I’m struggling to get Sphinx back up and running after deploying a rails app

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Editorial Team

Asked: May 13, 20262026-05-13T20:03:35+00:00 2026-05-13T20:03:35+00:00

I’m struggling to get Sphinx back up and running after deploying a rails app

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I’m struggling to get Sphinx back up and running after deploying a rails app to my VPS.

Specifically, I’m thrown this error:

** [out :: myapp.com] => Mixing in Lockdown version: 1.6.4
** [out :: myapp.com]
** [out :: myapp.com] Failed to start searchd daemon. Check /var/www/myapp/releases/20100227224936/log/searchd.log.
** [out :: myapp.com] Failed to start searchd daemon. Check /var/www/myapp/releases/20100227224936/log/searchd.log

However, a log file isn’t created!

This is the deploy.rb I am using (with thanks to Updrift 🙂 )

namespace :deploy do
desc "Restart the app"
task :restart, :roles => :app do

# This regen's the config file, stops Sphinx if running, then starts it.
# No indexing is done, just a restart of the searchd daemon
# thinking_sphinx.running_start

# The above does not re-index. If any of your define_index blocks
# in your models have changed, you will need to perform an index.
# If these are changing frequently, you can use the following
# in place of running_start

  thinking_sphinx.stop
  thinking_sphinx.index
  thinking_sphinx.start

# Restart the app
run "touch #{current_path}/tmp/restart.txt"
end

desc "Cleanup older revisions"
task :after_deploy do
cleanup
end

end

I’m using the Thinking Sphinx gem, v 1.3.16, passenger 2.2.10. Any thoughts you have would be greatly appreciated.

Many thanks!

Greg

UPDATE: Further to some more google searching, I’ve found a couple of other people with similar errors – seemingly related to port listening errors eg here and [I’m not allowed to link to the other one]. My production.sphinx.conf similarly has used port 9312, despite me specifying in sphinx.yml to use 3312.

Does anyone have any idea what might be causing this? Thanks.