Installing the new Alfresco Search Services with Solr 6

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Installing the new Alfresco Search Services with Solr 6

harry_peek
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With Alfresco 5.2 we are introducing Alfresco Search Services and Solr 6.3, read more about Solr 6.3 and the new features here.

With Solr 6 there is a significant change - it's now a standalone application powered by a jetty server. In this post we will cover the additional steps required to configure and setup Alfresco and Solr 6.

 

Enterprise with clustering license

NB if using SSL please also refer to this post

  1. Download Alfresco Solr 6 distribution from here, unpack and move to a preferred location.

  2. Start Solr 6 using the command below.

    $SOLR_HOME/solr/bin/solr start
  3. Open a browser (assuming you're in the same server where Solr 6 is installed) and navigate to:

    http://localhost:8983/solr/
  4. You should see Solr's admin screen - in here you can see the Solr version in use is 6.x.

  5. Edit the alfresco-global.properties file as shown below to disable SSL, then restart Alfresco.

    solr.secureComms=none
  6. Login as admin and navigate to the Admin Console. Use the following link (assuming you have Alfresco installed into localhost at port 8080).
    http://localhost:8080/alfresco/s/enterprise/admin/admin-systemsummary
  7. Upload and apply the appropriate license.

  8. Restart Alfresco, and once it's restarted return to the Admin Console.

  9. Select "Search Service" from the navigation.

  10. Select Solr 6 from the "Search Service In Use" dropdown and review the details.

  11. Click on Save to set Solr 6 as the default Search Engine.

  12. To create the new cores, select "Index Server Sharding" from the navigation.

  13. Select the "Dynamic Shard Instance Registration" check box and click 'Save'. 

  14. Click on Manage, which will launch the Index Server Shard Management popup.

  15. Enter the Solr 6 ip address, port and context (for example http://127.0.0.1:8983/solr) and click Add.

    You can also configure and setup Solr shards at this stage, this will be covered fully in another blog

  16. Scroll down to Manage Default Indexes and click on Create Alfresco to create Alfresco Core.

  17. Click on Create Archive to create the Archive Core.

  18. Scroll down to the Report section to see a response.

    Congratulation! You've now configured Alfresco to work with Solr 6.

  19. Now it's time to verify that it has created Alfresco and an Archive core. Open a browser (assuming you're in the same server where Solr 6 is installed) and navigate to:

    http://localhost:8983/solr/
  20. In the Solr Admin UI select the core selector dropdown and verify that both Alfresco and Archive are present in the dropdown.

  21. Allow a few minutes for the content to be searchable on Solr 6.

Community

  1. Download Alfresco community from http://alf-community-nightly.s3-website-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/ .
    When installing make sure you do not launch alfresco, by ticking the box (add image)
  2. Configure Alfresco to use Solr 6 as the default search subsystem
    by editing the alfresco-global.properties file (ALFRESCO_HOME/tomcat/shared/classes/alfresco-global.properties)
    ### Solr indexing ###
    index.subsystem.name=solr6
    solr.host=localhost
    solr.port=8983
    solr.port.ssl=8984
    solr.secureComms=none
  3. Download Alfresco Solr 6 distribution, unpack and copy the Solr 6 folder to $ALFRESCO_HOME.
  4. Solr 6 does not come with Alfresco workspace and archive stores by default so you'll need to create them. To do so start Solr and create the cores with the following command:
    ALFRESCO_HOME/solr6/solr/bin/solr start -a "-Dcreate.alfresco.defaults=alfresco,archive"
  5. Open a browser and navigate to http://localhost:8983/solr/to verify that Solr has started. You should see Solr's admin page
  6. Select the core selector dropdown and verify that both Alfresco and Archive are present in the dropdown.
    This signifies that both cores have been created.
  7. Start Alfresco and allow a couple of minutes to index the content.

For your interest, we would like to submit to your attention another tutorial fromAxel Faust about using Solr6 in Alfresco Community Edition 5.2 (201612 GA).

About the Author
Product Manager for search and analytics at Alfresco. Talk to me about Solr, search within our apps, search APIs and reporting and analytics needs. I'd love to know more about what you're doing with Alfresco in this area, if you have any issues with it that we can help with and anything else you'd like us to do.
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