Recipes: Ferret
Ferret (http://ferret.davebalmain.com/trac) is a high-performance, full-featured text search engine library written for Ruby.
It is inspired by Apache Lucene Java project.
acts_as_ferret comes with a built in DRb server that acts
as the central hub for all indexing and searching in your application.
Ferret now comes with a recipe for managing your Drb server. The Ferret config file is located at config/ferret_server.yml and
looks like this:
production:
host: ferret.yourdomain.com
port: 9009
pid_file: log/ferret.pid
The supplied recipe looks like this
namespace :ferret do
desc “Stop the Ferret server, and continue even if the operation fails.”
task :stop_safe, :roles => :app, 
n_error => :continue do
top.ferret.stop
end
desc “Start Ferret Server”
task :start, :roles => :app do
top.ferret.start
end
desc “Stop Ferret Server”
task :stop, :roles => :app do
top.ferret.stop
end
desc “Restart Ferret Server”
task :restart, :roles => :app do
top.ferret.restart
end
desc “Rebuild the Ferret index”
task :rebuild, :roles => :app do
run “cd #{current_path} && rake production ferret:rebuild”
end
desc “Destroy the Ferret index”
task :destroy, :roles => :app do
run “cd #{current_path} && rm -rf index/production index/development index/test”
end
end