ddev-solr

• What is ddev-solr?
• Getting started
• Create a collection
• Solr command line client
• Using alternate versions of Solr
• Add third party Solr modules and libraries
• Solarium
• Drupal and Search API Solr
  • Installation steps
• What’s the difference between this and ddev-drupal9-solr

What is ddev-solr?

ddev-solr provides Solr (Cloud) using a single Solr node, which is sufficient for local development requirements.

Existing applications that have been developed with Solr Standalone instead of Cloud should still work with Cloud. They connect to a collection instead a core but they should not notice that. </div>

Solr Cloud provides a lot of APIs to manage your collections, cores, schemas etc. Some of these APIs require a so-called “trusted” context. Solr therefore supports different technologies for authentication and authorization. The easiest one to configure is “Basic Authentication”. This DDEV service comes with a simple pre-configured security.json to provide such a trusted context based on basic authentication. It creates a single administrative account having full access rights:

• user: solr
• password: SolrRocks

Getting started

1. Install the add-on and restart:

    ddev add-on get ddev/ddev-solr && ddev restart
   

Once up and running, access Solr’s admin UI within your browser by opening https://<projectname>.ddev.site:8943. For example, if the project is named “myproject” the hostname will be https://myproject.ddev.site:8943.

The admin UI is protected by basic authentication. The preconfigured admin account in security.json is user solr using the password SolrRocks.

To access the Solr container from DDEV’s web container, use http://solr:8983.

Create a collection

Creating collections require that the configset to be used by this collection has been uploaded within a “trusted context”. This is ensured if you use the admin UI with the predefined admin account solr or if you use the solr command line client ddev solr-zk. If you use any other http client and the API, ensure that you use basic authentocation with the prconfigured admin account solr:SolrRocks.

The PHP solarium library provides all required methods as well. Some frameworks like Drupal provide a full integration to manage your Solr collections within the framework itself.

For backward compatibility to older ddev Solr integrations and legacy applications that just provide a Solr configset (sometimes simply called “Solr config”), there’s a ddev specific convenient method, too: Simply copy a configset directory to .ddev/solr/configsets/ and restart ddev. That configset will automatically be uploaded (or updated) to Solr using a trusted context and a corresponding collection with the same name will be created if it doesn’t exist already.

Solr command line client

The solr command line client is available as ddev command:

ddev solr

The zk command is usually executed as solr zk -z <HOST>:<PORT>. To ease its usage a convenient ddev command exists that uses preconfigured connection settings. So the -z option can be omitted:

ddev solr-zk

Both commands are preconfigured to connect as user solr which is the admin account.

Using alternate versions of Solr

This addon defaults to installing a preferred version of the docker Solr image, but can be configured to use a different version via environment variable ($SOLR_BASE_IMAGE). For example, if you would like to install the latest Solr 8.11.x, follow the steps below:

ddev addon get ddev/ddev-solr

# Change image version as appropriate.
ddev dotenv set .ddev/.env.solr --solr-base-image="solr:8.11"

# remove old solr volume (if this is downgrade)
ddev stop
docker volume rm ddev-$(ddev status -j | docker run -i --rm ddev/ddev-utilities jq -r '.raw.name')_solr

# rebuild solr image (required step)
ddev debug rebuild -s solr

ddev restart

# confirm the new Solr version (expect a value something like 8.11.4)
ddev solr version

Add third party Solr modules and libraries

Copy third party Solr modules and libraries jar files into .ddev/solr/lib/. To load and use them within a collection, add this line to your collection’s solrconfig.xml:

<lib dir="/opt/solr/modules/ddev/lib/" regex=".*\.jar" />

Solarium PHP client

Solarium is the leading Solr integration library for PHP. It is used by the modules and integrations of many PHP frameworks and CMS like Drupal, Typo3, Wordpress, Symfony, Laravel, … If you build your own PHP application and want to use Solarium directly, here is an example of how to configure the connection in DDEV.

use Solarium\Core\Client\Adapter\Curl;
use Symfony\Component\EventDispatcher\EventDispatcher;

$adapter = new Curl();
$eventDispatcher = new EventDispatcher();
$config = [
    'endpoint' => [
        'localhost' => [
            // Replace <project> by your project's name:
            'host' => 'solr',
            'port' => 8983,
            'path' => '/',
            // Use your collection name here:
            'collection' => 'techproducts',
            'username' => 'solr',
            'password' => 'SolrRocks',
        )
    )
);

$client = new Solarium\Client($adapter, $eventDispatcher, $config);

Drupal and Search API Solr

Solr Cloud is the “modern” (and simplest) way to run Solr. You need to configure a Search API server using Solr as backend and Solr Cloud with Basic Auth as its connector. Specify the username “solr” and password “SolrRocks” which are the pre-configured credentials for Basic Authentication in .ddev/solr/security.json.

Solr requires a Drupal-specific configset for any collection to index Drupal’s content. (In Solr Cloud “collections” are the equivalent to “cores” in classic Solr installations. Actually, in a big Solr Cloud installation a collection might consist of multiple cores across all Solr Cloud nodes.)

Starting from Search API Solr module version 4.2.1 you don’t need to define collections or configsets so you can safely ignore the “Create a collection” section in this documentation . You simply enable the search_api_solr_admin submodule which is part of the Search API Solr module. Then you create or update your “collections” at any time by clicking the “Upload Configset” button on the Search API server details page or use drush to do this with

ddev drush --numShards=1 search-api-solr:upload-configset SEARCH_API_SERVER_ID

Note: SEARCH_API_SERVER_ID is the machine name of your Search API server.The number of “shards” should always be “1” as this local installation only runs a single Solr node.

[!Note]. Use solr rather than localhost for the name of the solr server in your search api configuration. The Search API suggests localhost but that won’t work with DDEV.

For step-by-step setup details with screenshots refer to Drupal at your fingertips: Local Solr setup with Search API Solr.

Installation steps

1. Enable the search_api_solr_admin module. (This submodule is included in Search API Solr >= 4.2.1)
2. Create a search server using the Solr backend and select Solr Cloud with Basic Auth as connector:
   • HTTP protocol: http
   • Solr node: solr
   • Solr port: 8983
   • Solr path: /
   • Default Solr collection: techproducts (You can define any name here. The collection will be created automatically.)
   • Solr host context: solr
   • Username: solr
   • Password: SolrRocks
3. On the server’s “view” page click the Upload Configset button and check the “Upload (and overwrite) configset” checkbox.
4. Set the number of shards to 1.
5. Press Upload.

What’s the difference between this and ddev-drupal9-solr

ddev-drupal9-solr provides Solr running in a the “classic standalone” mode using a single core. ddev-solr runs Solr in the modern “cloud” mode (even if it just starts a single Solr node).

Running in cloud mode has several advantages. The biggest one from Drupal’s perspective is that every time an update of the search_api_solr module asks you to generate and deploy an updated configset, it is just a click in the UI or a single drush command instead of downloading and extracting a zip, copying the files to the ddev folder and restarting ddev. This is possible because of the Configset API Solr Cloud provides.

But there are also more and more APIs and features, which are only available in combination with Solr Cloud and which are supported by solarium and search_api_solr:

• Streaming Expressions
• Collection API
• Updating files like stop words, compound words, protected words, NLP models, LTR models, … on the the fly using APIs
• …

Another important difference of ddev-solr compared to ddev-drupal9-solr is, that ddev-solr configures Solr to be able to handle NLP models. So DDEV could be used with search_api_solr_nlp.

ddev-solr supports third party Solr plugins/modules/libraries.

Contributed and maintained by @mkalkbrenner