General

•  eZ Systems Website
•  Editor documentation

  Developer documentation

  Back to the top

Skip to end of metadata
Go to start of metadata

You are viewing an old version of this page. View the current version.

Compare with Current View Page History

« Previous Version 15 Next »

Version 1.0.x of Solr Bundle primarily aims to be used as replacement for Legacy (SQL-based) search engine for better scalability and performance (especially with field criteria and sort clauses). And while it also provides better full text search thanks to Solr, more advance search features like Faceting will come in later releases.

 

 

What is Solr Search Engine Bundle?

ezplatform-solr-search-engine as the package is called, aims to be a transparent drop in replacement for the SQL based "Legacy" search engine powering Search API by default. By enabling Solr and re-indexing your content, all your existing Search queries using SearchService, will be powered by Solr automatically. This allows you to scale up your eZ Platform installation and be able to continue development locally against SQL engine, and have a test infrastructure, Staging and Prod powered by Solr, thus removing considerable load from your database so it can focus on more important things, like publishing (wink).

See Architecture page for further information on the architecture of eZ Platform.

How to set up Solr Search engine

Step 1: Enabling the Bundle

Not needed with eZ Platform

This step is not needed for eZ Platform as of 15.09, however it is kept here for reference in case you have previously disabled the bundle.

 

  1. Add/Update composer dependencies:

    command line
  2. Activate EzPublishSolrSearchEngineBundle by adding the following lines to your app/AppKernel.php file: new EzSystems\EzPlatformSolrSearchEngineBundle\EzSystemsEzPlatformSolrSearchEngineBundle()

Step 2: Configuring & Starting Solr

 

Example here is for single core, look to Solr documentation for configuring Solr in other ways, also see the provided configuration for some examples.

 

First download and extract Solr, we currently support Solr 4.10.4:

 

Secondly, copy configuration files needed for eZ Solr Search Engine bundle, here from the root of your project to the place you extracted Solr:

Command line example

 

Thirdly, Solr Bundle does not commit solr index changes directly on repository updates, leaving it up to you to tune this using solrconfig.xml as best practice suggests, example config:

solrconfig.xml

Step 3: Configuring bundle

The Solr search engine bundle can be configured many ways, here are some examples:

Single Core example (default)

Out of the box in eZ Platform the following is enabled for simple setup:

config.yml

Shared Core example

In the following example we have decided to separate one language as the installation contains several similar languages, and one very different language that should receive proper language analysis for proper stemming and sorting behavior by Solr:

config.yml

Multi Core example

If full language analysis features are preferred, then each language can be configured to separate cores.

Note: Please make sure to test this setup against single core setup, as it might perform worse than single core if your project uses a lot of language fallbacks per siteaccess, as queries will then be performed across several cores at once.

config.yml

 

Step 4: Configuring repository with the specific search engine

The following is an example of configuring Solr Search Engine, where connection name is same as in example above, and engine is set to solr:

ezplatform.yml

%search_engine% is a parameter that is configured in app/config/parameters.yml, and should be changed from its default value "legacy" to "solr" to activate Solr as the Search engine.

Step 5: Clear prod cache

While Symfony dev environment keeps track of changes to yml files, prod does not, so to make sure Symfony reads the new config we clear cache:

Step 6: Run CLI indexing command

Make sure to configure your setup for indexing

Some exceptions might happen on indexing if you have not configured your setup correctly, here are the most common issues you may encounter:

  • Exception if Binary files in database have an invalid path prefix
    • Make sure ezplatform.yml configuration  var_dir is configured properly.
    • If your database is inconsistent in regards to file paths, try to update entries to be correct (but make sure to make a backup first).
  • Exception on unsupported Field Types
    • Make sure to implement all Field Types in your installation, or to configure missing ones as  NullType if implementation is not needed.
  • Content not immediately available 
    • Solr Bundle is on purpose not committing changes directly on Repository updates (on indexing), but letting you control this using Solr configuration.  Adjust Solr autoSoftCommit  visibility of change to search index) and/or autoCommit (hard commit, for durability and replication) to balance performance and load on your Solr instance against needs you have for "NRT".
  • Running out of memory during indexing
    • In general make sure to run indexing using prod environment to avoid debuggers and loggers from filing up memory.
    • Stash: Disable in_memory cache as recommended on Persistence cache for long running scripts.
    • Flysystem: An open issue exists where you can find further info https://jira.ez.no/browse/EZP-25325

Last step is to execute initial indexation of data:

Providing feedback

After completing the installation you are now free to use your site as usual. If you get any exceptions for missing features, have feedback on performance, or want to discuss, join our community slack channel at https://ezcommunity.slack.com/messages/ezplatform-use/

 

In this topic:

  • No labels