Contents
collective.solr integrates the Solr search engine with Plone.
Apache Solr is based on Lucene and is the enterprise open source search engine. It powers the search of sites like Twitter, the Apple and iTunes Stores, Wikipedia, Netflix and many more.
Solr does not only scale to any level of content, but provides rich search functionality, like faceting, geospatial search, suggestions, spelling corrections, indexing of binary formats and a whole variety of powerful tools to configure custom search solutions. It has integrated clustering and load-balancing to provide a high level of robustness.
collective.solr comes with a default configuration and setup of Solr that makes it extremely easy to get started,
yet provides a vastly superior search quality compared to Plone's integrated text search based on ZCTextIndex.
- Schema and Schemaless Configuration
- Information Retrieval System
- Speed (in comparission to ZCTextIndex)
- Facets
- Indexing of binary documents
- Spellchecking / suggestions
- Wildcard searches
- Exclude from search
- Elevation
A full Documentation of the Solr integration of Plone could be found on collectivesolr.readthedocs.org.
Download the latest default Solr configuration from github:
$ wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/collective/collective.solr/master/solr-9.9.x.cfg
Extend your buildout to use those files and make sure collective.solr is added to the eggs in your instance section. Your full buildout file should look something like this:
[buildout]
parts += instance
extends =
https://dist.plone.org/release/6.1.3/versions.cfg
solr-9.9.x.cfg
[instance]
recipe = plone.recipe.zope2instance
http-address = 8080
user = admin:admin
eggs =
Plone
collective.solr
After saving this to let's say buildout.cfg,
the buildout can be run and the Solr server and Plone instance started:
$ python3 -m venv py3 $ py3/bin/pip install -r https://dist.plone.org/release/6.1.3/requirements.txt $ py3/bin/buildout ... $ bin/solr-instance start $ bin/instance start
Next you should activate the collective.solr (site search) add-on in the add-on control panel of Plone.
After activation you should review the settings in the new Solr Settings control panel.
To index all your content in Solr you can call the provided maintenance view:
http://localhost:8080/plone/@@solr-maintenance/reindex
The connections settings for Solr can be configured in ZCML and thus in buildout. This makes it easier when copying databases between multiple Zope instances with different Solr servers.
Example:
zcml-additional =
<configure xmlns:solr="http://namespaces.plone.org/solr">
<solr:connection host="localhost" port="8983" base="/solr/plone"/>
</configure>
If you have a checkout of collective.solr, you can spin up a working installation with:
make all bin/solr-start bin/instance fg
Instead of running bin/solr-start you may want to run bin/solr-foreground in a separate terminal so you can see what Solr is doing.
Then:
- Create a Plone site
- In Site Setup >> Add-ons: install collective.solr
- In Site Setup >> Solr settings: activate solr integration
- In Site Setup >> Solr settings: open the "Solr Reindex" link
@@solr-maintenance/reindex
You can verify Solr indexing worked by opening http://localhost:8983/solr/#/plone/query and hitting the button "Execute Query". In a vanilla Classic site with example content, that should show 6 results.
The code is used in production in many sites and considered stable.
This add-on can be installed in a Plone 4.3 (or later) site to enable indexing operations
as well as searching (site and live search) using Solr.
Doing so will not only significantly improve search quality and performance -
especially for a large number of indexed objects,
but also reduce the memory footprint of your Plone instance
by allowing you to remove the SearchableText, Description and Title indexes from the catalog
as well as the lexicons if no other indexes are using them.
In large sites with 100000 content objects and more,
searches using ZCTextIndex often taken 10 seconds or more
and require a good deal of memory from ZODB caches.
Solr will typically answer these requests in 10ms to 50ms
at which point network latency and the rendering speed of Plone's page templates are a more dominant factor.
collective.solr works with Plone 6. Use older versions of collective.solr if you're using an older Plone version.
collective.solr works with Python 3.10+.
collective.solr works with Solr 9. Older versions might work as well but we do not test them.
Releases can be found on the Python Package Index at https://pypi.org/project/collective.solr. The code and issue trackers can be found on GitHub at https://github.com/collective/collective.solr.
For outstanding issues and features remaining to be implemented please see the issue tracker.