Sphinx on Webfaction for Rails

I'm looking to install Sphinx and thinking_sphinx on my basic shared hosting plan at webfaction so I can properly deploy my rails app. I'm positive webfaction supports this un开发者_如何学运维der my plan. I'm not anything near a linux guru in terms of skill level, but I know the basics.

How can I install Sphinx on my shared host without having sudo privileges?

I see that you posted this also at webfaction

Putting the link here, for others to benefit ...

Webfaction allows you to add your own gems without sudo. Because it's shared hosting they install the gems required by passenger/your app into a non standard location (/home/< username >/webapps/< application_name >/gems/). You'll need to add it to PATH in order to execute an installed gem in an ssh session and adding GEM_PATH/GEM_HOME can be useful as well. As an example, without adding the right directory to your PATH your bash session wont find 'bundle' if you're using bundler.

Webfaction has a short writeup of installing gems by hand at http://docs.webfaction.com/software/rails.html#installing-gems

As a side note, I'm able to run a Rails3 app on webfaction using capistrano for deployment. The bundle task installs the needed gems automatically.

PS - This is really a gem and webfaction issue. You may want to modify your tags for this question.