Liferay 6.1 integration with Solr Search Engine in Clustered environment

Liferay 6.1 integration with Solr Search Engine in Clustered environment

Solr is the popular, blazing fast open source enterprise search platform from the Apache Lucene project. Its major features include powerful full-text search, hit highlighting, faceted search, dynamic clustering, database integration, and rich document (e.g., Word, PDF) handling. Solr is highly scalable, providing distributed search and index replication, and it powers the search and navigation features of many of the world's largest internet sites. Refer to Apache Solr.

We have made enhancement to the search infrastructure of the portal recently. We abstracted out Lucene as a search engine, now people can build plugins that integrate with others search engines frameworks.

Currently the only plugin developed is one of the Solr, the Lucene plugin is the default implementation and comes bundled with the portal.

Roughly speaking, Solr is an application that listens for indexing and searching commands via HTTP requests. You can deploy Liferay in one server and have Solr running in a different server, this is very helpful for clustered portals because we got rid of racing issues when Lucene JDBC was used. Also, you can have a cluster of Solr instances that does load balancing of requests.

Use Case:  Integrate Solr Search with Liferay 6.1 in a clustered environment

Pre-requisite:

·         Download Liferay 6.1 CE version from here.

·         Download solr-web-6.1.0.1-ce-ga1-20120106155615760.war (Solr-Plugin) for Liferay 6.1 CE version

·         Download Apache Tomcat 7.0.x stable version.

·         Download Solr 1.4.1 release from here.

Configuration Steps:

Step 1: Extract the downloaded Solr 1.4.1 Zip file. I will call that extracted folder as SOLR_HOME. For e.g. consider SOLR_HOME as D:\Apache_solr\apache-solr-1.4.1

Step 2: Copy apache-solr-1.4.1.war from SOLR_HOME\dist\ to SOLR_HOME\example\solr

Step 3: Open SOLR_HOME\example\solr\conf\solrconfig.xml file and

Replace

<dataDir>${solr.data.dir:./solr/data}</dataDir>

With

   <dataDir>${solr.data.dir:<<SOLR_HOME>>/example/solr/data}</dataDir>

[Note : Instead of <<SOLR_HOME>> write down the actual path]

Step 4: It is recommended to run the solr instance on separate tomcat instance other than Liferay tomcat instance.

For that extract the downloaded Apache Tomcat 7.0.x. I will call that extracted folder as SOLR_TOMCAT. For e.g. Consider SOLR_TOMCAT as D:\Apache_Tomcat\apache-tomcat-7.0.16

Step 5: Open SOLR_TOMCAT/conf/server.xml and make necessary changes

·         Change server port to 9005

<Server port="9005" shutdown="SHUTDOWN">

·         Change Connector port to 9090 and redirectPort to 9443

<Connector port="9090" protocol="HTTP/1.1" connectionTimeout="20000" redirectPort="9443" />

·         Change AJP Connector port to 9009

<Connector port="9009" protocol="AJP/1.3" redirectPort="9443" />

Step 6: Set the following line to setenv.bat

export JAVA_OPTS="$JAVA_OPTS  -Dsolr.data.dir=<<SOLR_HOME>> /example/solr/data"

[Note: Instead of <<SOLR_HOME>> use actual path]

Step 7: Create a solr.xml under SOLR_TOMCAT\conf\Catalina\localhost\ with the following content

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>

<Context docBase="<<SOLR_HOME>>/example/solr/apache-solr-1.4.1.war" debug="0" crossContext="true">

<Environment name="solr/home" type="java.lang.String" value="<<SOLR_HOME>>/example/solr" override="true"/>

</Context>

[Note: Instead of <<SOLR_HOME>> use actual path]

Step 8:  Now start tomcat server and check whether it’s running without error. If started successfully then go to browser and check http://localhost:9090/solr. (You will find SOLR Home page here)

Step 9: Integrate SOLR Plugin with Liferay server.

[Note: For this step, we have an assumption that Liferay 6.1 Clustering is already setup using Apache Server in your machine and its running successfully as per this instructions].

      ·         Deploy the downloaded solr-web-6.1.0.1-ce-ga1-20120106155615760.war on both  Liferay           instances

      ·         Once its deployed, stop the Liferay server and SOLR_TOMCAT

      ·         Copy Schema.xml from Liferay_HOME1 or Liferay_HOME2\tomcat\webapps\solr-                       web\WEB-INF\conf\ to SOLR_HOME\example\solr\conf\

      ·         Open Liferay_HOME1\tomcat\webapps\solr-web\WEB-INF\classes\META-INF\solr-                     spring.xml and Liferay_HOME2\tomcat\webapps\solr-web\WEB-INF\classes\META-                     INF\solr-spring.xml modify

<bean id="com.liferay.portal.search.solr.server.BasicAuthSolrServer" class="com.liferay.portal.search.solr.server.BasicAuthSolrServer">

  <constructor-arg type="java.lang.String" value="http://localhost:8080/solr" />

  </bean>

With this

      <bean id="com.liferay.portal.search.solr.server.BasicAuthSolrServer" class="com.liferay.portal.search.solr.server.BasicAuthSolrServer">

<constructor-arg type="java.lang.String" value="http://localhost:9090/solr" />

</bean>

It’s done. Start SOLR_TOMCAT and Liferay server and test with OOTB Search portlet.

When you search anything on Liferay server, you will find that logs are updated on SOLR_TOMCAT console.

Test Case: To test this scenario, go to http://localhost:8082 and add any blog or web content on guest community. Now to go http://localhost:8081 and search that created content in OOTB Search portlet, if you will get result, it means its integrated successfully.