We’ve been playing around with the Sphinx full-text search engine and Ultrasphinx, the Ruby on Rails configurator and client to the Sphinx full text search engine. Sadly, it was giving us a warning about spell checking:

ultrasphinx: spelling support not available (raspell configuration raised "uninitialized constant Ultrasphinx::Spell::Aspell")

This is pretty easy to get rid of, though. You just need to install the aspell, spell checking library and raspell, the Ruby interface to aspell. The raspell README has instructions for installing aspell and raspell on both Mac and Ubuntu.

After we did this, we got one additional error:

ultrasphinx: spelling support not available (raspell configuration raised "No word lists can be found for the language "ap".")

Follow the instructions for setting up the custom wordlist needed by Ultrasphinx and you should be good to go.

Good luck and happy searching!