Sphinx on Windows and error 1067

I attempted to setup Sphinx on Windows, but was not trivial — problem was that I couldn’t run the SearchD as a Windows service since I got 1067 error (“Process Terminated unexpectedly“).

It’s not obvious but helpful to know how you can get the error message the service crashes with. To do so, go to Control panel → Administration → Event Viewer. Here you can get all notices and error messages that the service produces:

If you get your service running and search tool gives you the correct results, but your PHP application gets FALSE as query result, try to see what SphinxClient’s getLastError() method returns:

$s = new SphinxClient;
$s->setServer("localhost", 3312);
...
$result = $s->query('test');
echo $s->getLastError();

In my case there was a following message:

searchd error:
  client version is higher than daemon version
  (client is v.1.22, daemon is v.1.19)