When I run rake ts:index, I get the following error:
Generating Configuration to /Users/main/rails_projects/glassboard/config/development.sphinx.conf
Sphinx 2.0.4-release (r3135)
Copyright (c) 2001-2012, Andrew Aksyonoff
Copyright (c) 2008-2012, Sphinx Technologies Inc (http://sphinxsearch.com)
using config file '/Users/main/rails_projects/glassboard/config/development.sphinx.conf'...
indexing index 'user_core'...
ERROR: index 'user_core': sql_connect: FATAL: role "root" does not exist
(DSN=pgsql://root:***@localhost:5432/glassboard_development).
total 0 docs, 0 bytes
total 0.005 sec, 0 bytes/sec, 0.00 docs/sec
skipping non-plain index 'user'...
total 0 reads, 0.000 sec, 0.0 kb/call avg, 0.0 msec/call avg
total 0 writes, 0.000 sec, 0.0 kb/call avg, 0.0 msec/call avg
There's nothing online about this error I can find, what problem does Sphinx have with my database?
My OS is Mac 10.6.8 and I'm using (PostgreSQL) 9.1.4.
What version of Thinking Sphinx are you using? There was a bug quite some time ago that presumed the default database user was root if it wasn't specified (appropriate for MySQL, but not for PostgreSQL), but that was fixed. I'd recommend updating to the latest appropriate version for whatever Rails you're using (Rails 2: TS 1.4.14, Rails 3: TS 2.0.14).
Or you could update to TS 3.0.2 if you're on Rails 3.1 or newer - but there's significant changes there: http://pat.github.com/thinking-sphinx/upgrading.html