Solr Integration with AEM

 

Solr Integration with AEM

 

Solr is one of the most powerful integrations with AEM to improve indexing/search.

However, AEM comes standard with a functional search feature based on Apache Jackrabbit Oak. This is what AEM will use to work with indexes and search in the platform that can be leveraged when creating new AEM applications with no added cost. This solution is appropriate in many cases, mostly with simple sites that use search as a secondary feature. However, it can fall short in applications looking for an advanced search experience and features, or with huge repository sizes.

Solr is a popular, blazing-fast, open source enterprise search platform built on Apache Lucene.

Solr is highly reliable, scalable, and fault tolerant.

 

For Solr index to work with Oak, we need to setup a connection to able to communicate with a Solr instance/cluster.       

 

HttpSolrClient API used to query on Solr.

 

Setup Solr on machine

Download and install the latest release of Solr server from the following URL:

http://archive.apache.org/dist/lucene/solr/

 

Unzip the file so that you are able to view the following file structure.

You can start the Solr server by opening the command prompt and changing the working directory to the bin folder located in the directory in which you extracted the ZIP file. Run the following command:

solr start -e cloud -noprompt

To verify that Solr is running, go to the following URL:

http://localhost:8983/solr/#/

You should see the Solr web client.

Create a collection

1. From the web client, select Collection in the right hand column (shown above).

2 . Click Add Collection.

3. Name the new collection: collection.

 

Configure AEM to use Solr server

 

Under Configuration Manager

Search for AEM Solr Search - Solr Configuration Service and enter the following values:

 

                                        Index values with Solr

Go to, http://localhost:4502/etc/solr/solrindexer.html

 

This page is invoking the IndexContentToSolr sling servlet (you can see the source code of this servlet in the OSGi section of this article). If the index operation is successful, a message confirming the operation was successful appears, as shown in the previous illustration.  

You can validate if the SOLR docs are created by going to the following URL:

http://localhost:8983/solr/#/collection/query

 

Select collection from the drop-down control and click the Execute Query button. If successful, you will see the result set that contains We-retail content.