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Solr connector for SilverStripe fulltextsearch module

Introduction

This module provides a fulltextsearch module connector to Solr. It works with Solr in multi-core mode. It needs to be able to update Solr configuration files, and has modes for doing this by direct file access (when Solr shares a server with SilverStripe) and by WebDAV (when it's on a different server).

See the helpful Solr Tutorial, for more on cores and querying.

Requirements

Since Solr is Java based, it requires Java 1.5 or greater installed. It also requires a servlet container such as Tomcat, Jetty, or Resin. Jetty is already packaged with the module.

See the official Solr installation docs for more information.

Note that these requirements are for the Solr server environment, which doesn't have to be the same physical machine as the SilverStripe webhost.

Installation

Configure Solr in file mode. The 'path' directory has to be writeable by the user the Solr search server is started with (see below).

// File: mysite/_config.php:
<?php
SearchUpdater::bind_manipulation_capture();
Solr::configure_server(isset($solr_config) ? $solr_config : array(
	'host' => 'localhost',
	'indexstore' => array(
		'mode' => 'file',
		'path' => BASE_PATH . '/fulltextsearch/thirdparty/fulltextsearch/server/solr'
	)
));

Create an index

// File: mysite/code/MyIndex.php:
<?php
class MyIndex extends SolrIndex {
	function init() {
		$this->addClass('Page');
		$this->addAllFulltextFields();
	}
}

Start the search server (via CLI, in a separate terminal window or background process)

cd fulltextsearch/thirdparty/fulltextsearch/server/
java -jar start.jar

Initialize the configuration (via CLI)

sake dev/tasks/Solr_configure

Usage

After configuring Solr, you have the option to add your existing content to its indices. Run the following command:

sake dev/tasks/Solr_reindex

This will rebuild all indices. You can narrow down the operation with the following options:

index: PHP class name of an index
class: PHP model class to reindex
start: Offset (applies to matched records)
variantstate: JSON encoded string with state, e.g. '{"SearchVariantVersioned":"Stage"}'
verbose: Debug information

Note: The Solr indexes will be stored as binary files inside your SilverStripe project. You can also copy the thirdparty/solr directory somewhere else, just set the path value in mysite/_config.php to point to the new location. And of course run java -jar start.jar from the new directory.

Custom Types

Solr supports custom field type definitions which are written to its XML schema. Many standard ones are already included in the default schema. As the XML file is generated dynamically, we can add our own types by overloading the template responsible for it: types.ss.

In the following example, we read out type definitions from a new file mysite/solr/templates/types.ss instead:

<?php
class MyIndex extends SolrIndex {
	function getTypes() {
		return $this->renderWith(Director::baseFolder() . '/mysite/solr/templates/types.ss');
	}
}

Debugging

Using the web admin interface

You can visit http://localhost:8983/solr, which will show you a list to the admin interfaces of all available indices. There you can search the contents of the index via the native SOLR web interface.

It is possible to manually replicate the data automatically sent to Solr when saving/publishing in SilverStripe, which is useful when debugging front-end queries, see thirdparty/fulltextsearch/server/silverstripe-solr-test.xml.

java -Durl=http://localhost:8983/solr/MyIndex/update/ -Dtype=text/xml -jar post.jar silverstripe-solr-test.xml

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