I started using the acts_as_ferret plugin for ruby on rails today. I was having a problem with the site not getting indexed – After putting the acts_as_ferret in the desired models, I searched for words that I knew existed and i was not getting any responses.

I figured out that it was not being indexed. if the index directory does not exist than the plugin calls rebuild_index method. This is supposed to go through your database and create the index.

The app was failing executing the rebuild_index method. I googled the error and came across this post It was an error because i was using Unicode. So I added the following to my environment.rb file and it has indexed the files :

    ENV['LANG'] = 'en_GB.UTF-8'
    ENV['LC_TIME'] = 'C'

All I have to do now is figure out how to use ferret :)

Hamza