Making the Required Move to
External Solr
Mark Cooper, Brian Hoffman, Christine Di Bella
November 3, 2021
What we’ll cover
• What is Solr?
• Solr in ArchivesSpace
• Why ArchivesSpace will need external Solr
• Installing and configuring Solr
• Resources
• Q&A
What is Solr?
• Open source search platform built on Apache Lucene
• Versatile and scalable
• Large, active community
• Used by many open source and proprietary sites and
projects, including Blacklight and ArcLight, the Internet
Archive, JSTOR, and Netflix
Solr in ArchivesSpace
• It's the search engine for ArchivesSpace
• When we say "index" this is the part we're talking about
• Determines weighting in search results
• Through the current version, embedded into releases of
the application, though it was also possible to use external
Solr
• "External Solr" means ArchivesSpace points to an instance
of Solr that lives outside of your ArchivesSpace instance
• Similar to how MySQL needs to be installed separately
Why ArchivesSpace will need external Solr
• ArchivesSpace currently uses Solr v4.10.4 (released in
2014)
• Solr itself is currently on v8.10.1
• Because of changes made by the Solr maintainers, Solr is
no longer embeddable
• All versions of Solr past the one we're using require
external Solr (For a full technical explanation see:
https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/solr/WhyNoWar)
Why ArchivesSpace will need external Solr
• Staying on this old version has risk since it is not supported
• Staying on this old version limits our ability to improve
search capabilities in the application
• We stayed on the older version as long as we could to
minimize inconvenience to the community, but we need to
move on.
• Please note: if you use a hosting provider to manage your
ArchivesSpace, your hosting provider will manage Solr too
Benefits of managing your own Solr
• Ability to monitor what's going on with your indexing
• Ability to use any of the features that are in the Solr
documentation to manage the server
• Would allow people to use Solr cloud configurations;
potentially easier integration with other applications,
better performance
Different ways to run external Solr
• Install locally
• Cloud
• Ansible
• Use a Docker container
Some ArchivesSpace-specific Solr files will be
provided in an ArchivesSpace release.
Overview of steps to run ArchivesSpace with
external Solr
(This will be part of your upgrade process once an
ArchivesSpace release with the Solr update comes out)
1. Stop ArchivesSpace
2. Install Solr using your preferred method
3. Start Solr
Overview of steps to run ArchivesSpace with
external Solr
4. Apply ArchivesSpace configuration using the files and
directions provided with the release
5. Ensure Solr URL is correct in the config file
6. Reindex ArchivesSpace using your preferred method
(easiest is to delete indexer_state files)
7. Restart ArchivesSpace
8. Success:
Nothing changes for you and your users from
this point on and everyone goes on with their
day
Resources for downloading and installing
Solr
• General directions from Solr:
https://solr.apache.org/guide/8_9/installing-solr.html
• Technical documentation from ArchivesSpace:
https://archivesspace.github.io/tech-docs/provisioning/solr.html
• Tutorial to come
• ArchivesSpace members are eligible for technical support to get
help setting up Solr:
https://archivesspace.org/member-area/technical-support
• More to come as the release approaches
