Installing Solr: Basic Installation

This document has been updated and ported to Liferay Learn and is no longer maintained here.

There are two ways to install the Liferay Connector to Solr 7:

1. Navigate to Liferay Marketplace and download the app that corresponds to your portal.

Once the app LPKG is downloaded, copy it to Liferay_Home/osgi/marketplace.

2. In your running portal instance, navigate to Control Panel → Apps → Store. Sign in using your credentials, search for Solr Search Engine, and purchase (it’s free) the Liferay Connector to Solr 7 entry.

As you proceed, remember these terms:

Solr Home: The center of the Solr system (pun intended). This directory is solr-[version]/server/solr.

Liferay Home: The root folder of your Liferay DXP installation. It contains the osgi, deploy, data, and license folders, among others.

There are two installation steps:

1. Installing and configuring Solr 7.

2. Installing and configuring the Solr 7 connector for Liferay DXP.

Before configuring Liferay DXP for Solr, install and set up Solr.

Installing and Configuring Solr 7

To install and properly configure Solr for Liferay DXP:

1. Download Solr and unzip it.

2. Navigate to solr-[version]/server/solr. This is Solr Home.

3. Create a new folder called liferay.

4. In the liferay folder, create two new folders: conf and data.

5. Copy the contents of Solr_Home/configsets/_default/conf to Solr_Home/liferay/conf.

6. Open the Liferay Connector to Solr 7’s LPKG file with an archive manager.

   Open the com.liferay.portal.search.solr7.impl.jar file, and extract

   META-INF/resources/solrconfig.xml
   

   and

   META-INF/resources/schema.xml
   

   to

   Solr_Home/liferay/conf
   

   This replaces the current solrconfig.xml and schema.xml files with ones that tell Solr how to index data coming from Liferay DXP.

7. Create a core.properties file in Solr_Home/liferay and add this configuration:

   config=solrconfig.xml
   dataDir=data
   name=liferay
   schema=schema.xml
   

8. Checkpoint: your Solr_Home/liferay folder now has this structure:

   liferay
   ├── conf
   │   ├── lang
   │   │   ├── contractions_ca.txt
   │   │   ├── ....txt
   │   ├── managed-schema
   │   ├── params.json
   │   ├── protwords.txt
   │   ├── schema.xml
   │   ├── solrconfig.xml
   │   ├── stopwords.txt
   │   └── synonyms.txt
   ├── core.properties
   └── data
   

9. Start the Solr server by entering

   ./bin/solr start -f
   

   from the top-level folder of your Solr installation (solr-[version]).

10. The Solr server listens on port 8983 by default. Navigate to http://localhost:8983/solr/#/~cores (assuming you’re testing locally with localhost as your host), and confirm that the liferay core is available.

Solr is now installed. Next install and configure the Solr connector.

Installing and Configuring the Liferay Solr Adapter

Since Elasticsearch is the default search engine, the Elasticsearch connector is already installed and running. You must stop it before configuring the Solr connector.

Stopping the Elasticsearch Connector

Stop the Elasticsearch connector bundle using the App Manager, the Felix Gogo shell, or the bundle blacklist. If you’re a Liferay DXP customer, use the blacklist feature as described below. The App Manager and Gogo shell rely on the osgi/state folder to “remember” the state of the bundle. If you delete this folder (recommended during patching) the Elasticsearch connector is reinstalled and started automatically.

Navigate to Control Panel → Apps → App Manager.

Once in the App Manager, search for elasticsearch. Find the Liferay Connector to Elasticsearch 6 module and click the Actions (()) button. Choose the Deactivate option. This leaves the bundle installed, but stops it in the OSGi runtime.

Alternatively, use the Felix Gogo shell to stop the Elasticsearch connector. Enter

lb elasticsearch

You’ll see two active bundles for the Liferay Connector to Elasticsearch 6: an API and an IMPL bundle.

ID|State      |Level|Name
476|Active     |   10|Liferay (CE) Connector to Elasticsearch 6 - API (3.0.0)
478|Active     |   10|Liferay Portal Search Elasticsearch 6 API (3.0.4)
480|Active     |   10|Liferay Portal Search Elasticsearch 6 SPI (3.2.1)
706|Active     |   10|Liferay (CE) Connector to Elasticsearch 6 - Impl (3.0.0)
707|Active     |   10|Liferay Portal Search Elasticsearch 6 Implementation (3.0.15)

Stop the API bundle by entering

stop [bundle ID]

In the example above, the [bundle ID] is 476.

Liferay DXP: DXP customers should blacklist the Elasticsearch, Shield, and Marvel plugins.

1. Create a

   com.liferay.portal.bundle.blacklist.internal.BundleBlacklistConfiguration.config
   

   file with these contents:

   blacklistBundleSymbolicNames=["com.liferay.portal.search.elasticsearch6.spi","com.liferay.portal.search.elasticsearch6.api","com.liferay.portal.search.elasticsearch6.impl","Liferay Enterprise Search Monitoring ","Liferay Enterprise Search Security "]
   

   If the LES Security and Monitoring LPKG files are installed, you must blacklist these too.

2. Place the file in Liferay Home/osgi/configs.

Install and Configure the Solr Connector

Now you’re ready to install the connector:

1. Start Liferay DXP, then deploy the Solr connector by copying the LPKG you downloaded to Liferay_Home/deploy.

   You’ll see a STARTED message in your Liferay DXP log once the Solr connector is installed. Here’s what the log message looks like:

   2018-11-06 19:59:49.396 INFO  [pipe-start 943 944][BundleStartStopLogger:39] STARTED com.liferay.portal.search.solr7.api_2.0.5 [943]
   2018-11-06 19:59:49.490 INFO  [pipe-start 943 944][BundleStartStopLogger:39] STARTED com.liferay.portal.search.solr7.impl_2.0.11 [944]
   

2. To re-index against Solr, navigate to Control Panel → Configuration → Search, and click Execute next to the Reindex all search indexes option.

Figure 1: Once the Solr connector is installed, you can re-index your Liferay DXP data against your Solr server.

In production deployments, specify your edits to the Solr connector’s default configurations using a configuration file deployed to the Liferay_Home/osgi/configs folder. Name the file

com.liferay.portal.search.solr7.configuration.SolrConfiguration.config

During testing and development, use the Solr 7 System Settings entry Control Panel → Configuration → System Settings for editing the default configurations.

Figure 2: You can configure Solr from Liferay DXP's System Settings application. This is most useful during development and testing.

The next article covers clustering Solr with SolrCloud.