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?

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I see that you posted this also at webfaction

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

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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.