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Solr

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Solr

Apache Solr is a scalable and fault-tolerant search index.

Solr search with generic schemas provided, and a custom schema is also supported.

To use it in your application, add it to .symfony/services.yaml:

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mysearch:
    # supported versions: 3.6, 4.10, 6.3, 6.6, 7.6, 7.7, 8.0, 8.4
    type: solr:8.4
    disk: 1024

And wire it in .symfony.cloud.yaml:

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relationships:
    solr: "mysearch:solr"

Environment Variables

The configuration is exposed via the following environment variables (where SOLR is the upper-cased version of the key defined in the relationship above):

  • SOLR_HOST: The Solr host
  • SOLR_PORT: The Solr port
  • SOLR_NAME: The Solr name
  • SOLR_DATABASE: An alias for SOLR_NAME

Configuration

Solr 4

For Solr 4, SymfonyCloud supports only a single core per server called collection1.

If you want to provide your own Solr configuration, add a core_config key in the .symfony/services.yaml file:

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mysearch:
    type: solr:4.10
    disk: 1024
    configuration:
        core_config: !archive "<directory>"

The directory parameter points to a directory in the Git repository, in or below the .symfony/ folder. This directory needs to contain everything that Solr needs to start a core. At the minimum, solrconfig.xml and schema.xml.

Solr 6 and later

For Solr 6 and later, SymfonyCloud supports multiple cores via different endpoints. Cores and endpoints are defined separately, with endpoints referencing cores. Each core may have its own configuration or share a configuration:

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solrsearch:
    type: solr:6.6
    disk: 1024
    configuration:
        cores:
            mainindex:
                conf_dir: !archive "core1-conf"
            extraindex:
                conf_dir: !archive "core2-conf"
        endpoints:
            main:
                core: mainindex
            extra:
                core: extraindex

Each endpoint is available in the relationships definition in .symfony.cloud.yaml:

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relationships:
    solr1: 'solrsearch:main'
    solr2: 'solrsearch:extra'

Configsets

For even more customizability, it’s also possible to define Solr configsets. For example, the following snippet would define one configset, which would be used by all cores. Specific details can then be overridden by individual cores using core_properties, which is equivalent to the Solr core.properties file.

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solrsearch:
    type: solr:8.4
    disk: 1024
    configuration:
        configsets:
            mainconfig: !archive "configsets/solr6"
        cores:
            english_index:
                core_properties: |
                    configSet=mainconfig
                    schema=english/schema.xml
            arabic_index:
                core_properties: |
                    configSet=mainconfig
                    schema=arabic/schema.xml
        endpoints:
            english:
                core: english_index
            arabic:
                core: arabic_index

Caution

Note that not all core.properties features make sense to specify in the core_properties property. Some keys, such as name and dataDir, are not supported, and may result in a solrconfig that fails to work as intended, or at all.

Default configuration

If no configuration is specified, the default configuration is equivalent to:

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solrsearch:
    type: solr:8.4
    configuration:
        cores:
            collection1:
                conf_dir: {}  # This will pick up the default configuration
        endpoints:
            solr:
                core: collection1

Limitations

The recommended maximum size for configuration directories (zipped) is 2MB. These need to be monitored to ensure they don’t grow beyond that. If the zipped configuration directories grow beyond this, performance will decline and deploys will become longer. The directory archives will be compressed and string encoded. You could use this bash pipeline inside the directory to get an idea of the archive size:

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$ echo $(($(tar czf - . | base64 | wc -c )/(1024*1024))) Megabytes

The !archive "<directory"> is a collection of configuration data, like a data dictionary, e.g. small collections of key/ value sets. The best way to keep the size small is to restrict the directory context to plain configurations. Including binary data like plugin .jars will inflate the archive size, and is not recommended.

This work, including the code samples, is licensed under a Creative Commons BY-SA 3.0 license.