Recently a client requested to setup SphinX, a great full-text search engine for MySQL. Installing the Sphinx daemon was straightforward as you can compile it from the source or use a .DEB/.RPM package but SphinxSE was a little bit tricky since it needed to be installed as a plugin on a running MySQL server.

So if you use Debian or Centos and install your MySQL from a .deb or .rpm package this is how you do it.

1. This requires MySQL 5.1 since it supports plugins and you will not have to recompile MySQL to have support for SphinxSE.