PostgreSQL 8.3 and newer

Add a text search configuration 'default':

CREATE TEXT SEARCH CONFIGURATION public.default ( COPY = pg_catalog.english )

See the PostgreSQL manual for more information.

For portability issues and converting pre-8.3 installations see the tsearch2 module documentation.

TSearch installation for PostgreSQL 8.2 and older

TSearch is an offical contribution module in PostgreSQL 7.4 to 8.2. Depending on how you installed Postgres you might to do some of these steps.

I recently added an experimental shell script to the root of the project called dbsetup.sh... you can give that a shot if you want - it might do this all for you:

cd ~/dev/tsearch [or where ever your rails app is]
chmod 755 dbsetup.sh
sudo ./dbsetup.sh your-db-name your-db-username

Step 1: Does TSearch exist?

From terminal do:

locate tsearch2.sql

Which hopefully returns something like:

/usr/local/pgsql/share/contrib/tsearch2.sql
/usr/local/pgsql/share/contrib/untsearch2.sql

You can skip to Step 2 if it exists

Step 1.1: Try rebuilding

Try rebuilding your code...

cd contrib/tsearch2
make
su
make install

Goto Step 1

If that didn't work...

Step 1.2: Another thing to try

tar xzvf postgresql-version.tgz
cd postgresql-version
./configure

Goto Step 1.1

Step 2: Setup your Database

So - you did a locate tsearch2.sql and something was found... we'll assume you're on a Mac and something was found at /usr/local/pgsql/share/contrib/

Run the sql script:

cd /usr/local/pgsql/share/contrib/
su root
su postgres
psql your_database_name < tsearch2.sql

Grant required permissions:

su root
su postgres
psql your_database_name

psql> grant all on public.pg_ts_cfg to db_username_from_database_yml;
psql> grant all on public.pg_ts_cfgmap to db_username_from_database_yml;
psql> grant all on public.pg_ts_dict to db_username_from_database_yml;
psql> grant all on public.pg_ts_parser to db_username_from_database_yml;

Step 3: Quick confirmation test

Give it a quick test to make sure the basics are there:

psql your_database_name
your_data_base_name=# select to_tsvector('default','Our first string used today first string');
                to_tsvector                 
--------------------------------------------
 'use':4 'first':2,6 'today':5 'string':3,7
(1 row)