search api

Earlier this year, I completely revamped Hosted Apache Solr's architecture, making it more resilient, more scalable, and better able to support having different Solr versions and configurations per customer.

Today I'm happy to officially announce support for Solr 7.x (in addition to 4.x). This means that no matter what version of Drupal you're on (6, 7, or 8), and no matter what Solr module/version you use (Apache Solr Search or Search API Solr 1.x or 2.x branches), Hosted Apache Solr is optimized for your Drupal search!

Note: Extra special thanks to Doug Vann for providing motivation to finally post this blog post!

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Early in 2016, when the Search API and Solr-related modules for Drupal 8 were in early alpha status, I wrote the blog post Set up a faceted Apache Solr search page on Drupal 8 with Search API Solr and Facets.

After a few months of testing, I'm happy to announce Hosted Apache Solr now supports Search API Solr with Drupal 8! Both Search API and Search API Solr have been getting closer to stable releases, and more people have been requesting Drupal 8 search cores, so I decided to finish testing and updating support guides this weekend.

Note: A lot has changed in Drupal 8 and the Search API module ecosystem since this post was written in May 2016... I wrote a new blog post for Faceted Solr Search in Drupal 8, so please read that if you're just getting started. I'm leaving this up as a historical reference, as the general process and architecture are the same, but many details are different.

In Drupal 8, Search API Solr is the consolidated successor to both the Apache Solr Search and Search API Solr modules in Drupal 7. I thought I'd document the process of setting up the module on a Drupal 8 site, connecting to an Apache Solr search server, and configuring a search index and search results page with search facets, since the process has changed slightly from Drupal 7.

I wanted to document this here just because it took me a little while to get all the bits working just right so I could have a hierarchical taxonomy display inside a Facet API search facet, rather than a flat display of only the taxonomy terms directly related to the nodes in the current search.

Basically, I had a search facet on a search page that allowed users to filter search results by a taxonomy term, and I wanted it to show the taxonomy's hierarchy:

To do this, you need to do two main things:

1. Make sure your taxonomy field is being indexed with taxonomy hierarchy data intact.
2. Set up the Facet API facet for this taxonomy term so it will display the full hierarchy.

Let's first start by making sure the taxonomy information is being indexed (refer to the image below):

In earlier Solr for Drupal Developers posts, you learned about Apache Solr and it's history in and integration with Drupal. In this post, I'm going to walk you through a quick guide to getting Apache Solr running on your local workstation so you can test it out with a Drupal site you're working on.

The guide below is for those using Mac or Linux workstations, but if you're using Windows (or even if you run Mac or Linux), you can use Drupal VM instead, which optionally installs Apache Solr alongside Drupal.

As an aside, I am writing this series of blog posts from the perspective of a Drupal developer who has worked with large-scale, highly customized Solr search for Mercy (example), and with a variety of small-to-medium sites who are using Hosted Apache Solr, a service I've been running as part of Midwestern Mac since early 2011.

Installing Apache Solr in a Virtual Machine

Apache Solr can be run directly from any computer that has Java 1.7 or later, so technically you could run it on any modern Mac, Windows, or Linux workstation natively. But to keep your local workstation cleaner, and to save time and hassle (especially if you don't want to kludge your computer with a Java runtime!), this guide will show you how to set up an Apache Solr virtual machine using Vagrant, VirtualBox, and Ansible.

Let's get started:

Drupal has included basic site search functionality since its first public release. Search administration was added in Drupal 2.0.0 in 2001, and search quality, relevance, and customization was improved dramatically throughout the Drupal 4.x series, especially in Drupal 4.7.0. Drupal's built-in search provides decent database-backed search, but offers a minimal set of features, and slows down dramatically as the size of a Drupal site grows beyond thousands of nodes.

In the mid-2000s, when most custom search solutions were relatively niche products, and the Google Search Appliance dominated the field of large-scale custom search, Yonik Seeley started working on Solr for CNet Networks. Solr was designed to work with Lucene, and offered fast indexing, extremely fast search, and as time went on, other helpful features like distributed search and geospatial search. Once the project was open-sourced and released under the Apache Software Foundation's umbrella in 2006, the search engine became one of the most popular engines for customized and more performant site search.

As an aside, I am writing this series of blog posts from the perspective of a Drupal developer who has worked with large-scale, highly customized Solr search for Mercy (example), and with a variety of small-to-medium sites who are using Hosted Apache Solr, a service I've been running as part of Midwestern Mac since early 2011.

Timeline of Apache Solr and Drupal Solr Integration

If you can't view the timeline, please click through and read this article on Midwestern Mac's website directly.

A brief history of Apache Solr Search and Search API Solr

Only two years after Apache Solr was released, the first module that integrated Solr with Drupal, Apache Solr Search, was created. Originally, the module was written for Drupal 5.x, but it has been actively maintained for many years and was ported to Drupal 6 and 7, with some relatively major rewrites and modifications to keep the module up to date, easy to use, and integrated with all of Apache Solr's new features over time. As Solr gained popularity, many Drupal sites started switching from using core search or the Views module to using Apache Solr.