Before we proceed any further, let's first check whether Sphinx was properly installed on our system. As we had used the --prefix configure option during installation, all Sphinx binaries and configuration files must have been placed in one single directory, that is, the one which was specified with --prefix.

We are assuming that you have installed Sphinx on a Linux machine. If everything went fine then a directory /usr/local/sphinx should have been created on your system. It should be structured in the same way as the following screenshot.

You can see that we have a few binary files in bin directory and few configuration files in the etc directory. Then we have the var directory that will hold the actual index data and search logs. We will look at all of these in details in later chapters.

To test whether the Sphinx binary is working first change your directory to bin:

$ cd /usr/local/sphinx/bin 

Then issue the command./indexer:

You can see that it outputs some information along with the version of Sphinx being installed, which in our case is 0.9.9.

The output above confirms that we are good to go, so let's move forward