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Installing Solr

7.2-7.3 (CE, DXP); 7.4 DXP U60+

Solr is a popular enterprise search platform built on Apache Lucene. It’s reliable, scalable, and fault tolerant. Read more about it here.

Warning

Solr is in maintenance mode in Liferay 7.4.

These instructions describe installing Solr 8 for the compatible Liferay versions. If installing Solr 7, adjust the version name as necessary.

Important

There are important limitations when using Solr. Read Solr Limitations before installing.

Compatibility

See the Search Engine Compatibility Matrix for detailed information on the compatible Solr and Liferay versions by patch level.

Downloading the Solr Connector

Warning

Do not install the Solr connector into a running Liferay until the blacklist and connector configurations are in place and Solr is running.

If you haven’t already acquired the connector to Solr,

  1. In a running Liferay, go to Control Panel → Marketplace → Store. Sign in.

  2. Grant access to the app.

  3. Search for Solr 8 and select the app corresponding to your Liferay installation:

    Liferay FlavorSolr Connector Name
    Liferay Portal/Community EditionLiferay CE Connector to Solr 8
    Liferay DXPLiferay Connector to Solr 8

  4. Click the Free button in the app’s landing page.

  5. Choose a project if it exists, or add one.

  6. Agree to the conditions and click Purchase.

After purchase, download the LPKG file from the Past Versions page.

  1. Substitute your https://liferay.com user.name in the following URL:

    CE: https://web.liferay.com/web/[user.name]/apps/-/marketplace_apps/225525277/versions DXP: https://web.liferay.com/web/[user.name]/apps/-/marketplace_apps/182518167/versions

  2. Click App to download the app’s LPKG file.

Refer to the Search Engine Compatibility Matrix for the compatible application versions for your Liferay version and patch level.

Disabling Elasticsearch-Only Features

When installing the Liferay Connector to Solr, you must blacklist or otherwise disable

  • the modules for certain DXP features that only work with Elasticsearch
  • the Liferay Connector to Elasticsearch’s modules

Blacklisting Elasticsearch-Only Features

Important

Before proceeding, stop Liferay.

To blacklist Elasticsearch-only features,

  1. On Liferay DXP 7.4, use a portal property or Docker environment variable to disable all Liferay Enterprise Search features:

    Add this property to portal-ext.properties:

    enterprise.product.enterprise.search.enabled=false

    Set this Docker environment variable:

    LIFERAY_ENTERPRISE_PERIOD_PRODUCT_PERIOD_ENTERPRISE_PERIOD_SEARCH_PERIOD_ENABLED=false

    See Activating Liferay Enterprise Search for more information.

  2. Create a blacklist configuration file. The name depends on your Liferay version:

    For Liferay 7.4, create

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

    For Liferay 7.2 and 7.3, create

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

  3. Enter the configuration for your version of Liferay.

    Liferay 7.4:

    blacklistBundleSymbolicNames=[\
   "com.liferay.portal.search.elasticsearch7.api",\
   "com.liferay.portal.search.elasticsearch7.impl",\
   "com.liferay.portal.search.elasticsearch7.spi",\
]

    This configuration disables the Elasticsearch 7 search engine connector’s modules. The enterprise.product.enterprise.search.enabled=false property disables Liferay Enterprise Search modules. Installing Solr automatically disables other incompatible features.

    Liferay 7.2 and 7.3:

    blacklistBundleSymbolicNames=[\
   "com.liferay.portal.search.elasticsearch7.api",\
   "com.liferay.portal.search.elasticsearch7.impl",\
   "com.liferay.portal.search.elasticsearch7.spi",\
   "com.liferay.portal.search.tuning.rankings.web",\
   "com.liferay.portal.search.tuning.synonyms.web",\
   "com.liferay.portal.search.tuning.web",\
   "com.liferay.portal.search.tuning.web.api"\
]

  4. Place the file in Liferay’s osgi/configs folder.

Installing and Configuring Solr

To install and configure Solr for Liferay,

  1. Download a compatible Solr server and unzip it.

  2. Navigate to solr-[version]/server/solr.

  3. Create a new folder called liferay and two subfolders: liferay/conf and liferay/data.

  4. Copy the contents of configsets/_default/conf to the liferay/conf folder.

  5. Open the Liferay Connector to Solr 8’s LPKG file with an archive manager.

  6. Open the Liferay Connector to Solr 8 - Impl.lpkg.

  7. Open the com.liferay.portal.search.solr8.impl.jar file, and extract

    META-INF/resources/solrconfig.xml

    and

    META-INF/resources/schema.xml

    to

    liferay/conf

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

  8. Create a core.properties file in the liferay folder and add this configuration:

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

  9. Checkpoint: your liferay folder now has this structure:

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

  10. Start the Solr server by entering the following from the top-level folder of your Solr installation (solr-[version]):

    ./bin/solr start -f

  11. 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 and started. Next install and configure the Solr connector for Liferay.

Installing and Configuring the Solr Connector

Important

Before proceeding, stop Liferay.

Once the connector to Solr is installed, the default configuration works for a test installation because the default values in the Liferay Connector to Solr match Solr’s own defaults. See the Configuration Reference for the complete list of available settings. At a minimum, you must configure the read and write URLs for the connector in production environments.

It is most common to make your edits to the Solr connector’s default configurations using a configuration file deployed to Liferay’s osgi/configs folder:

  1. Name the file

    com.liferay.portal.search.solr8.configuration.SolrConfiguration.config

  2. Copy the Solr connector LPKG you downloaded to Liferay’s osgi/marketplace folder and place its configuration files in osgi/configs.

  3. Start Liferay.

  4. Verify the Solr connection in Liferay. Open the Global Menu and navigate to Control Panel → Configuration → Search and make sure the connection is active.

    Verify the Solr connection in the search administration console.

  5. Reindex your Liferay data into Solr. Open the Global Menu and navigate to Control Panel → Configuration → Search. In the Index Actions pane, click Execute next to the Reindex Search Indexes option.

    Reindex the spell check indexes too.

High Availability with SolrCloud

Use SolrCloud if you need a cluster of Solr servers. Note that to use SolrCloud in production, you should set up an external ZooKeeper ensemble. ZooKeeper is a centralized coordination service for managing distributed systems like your SolrCloud cluster.

The steps included here are the bare minimum of what you must do to configure SolrCloud with Liferay. For example, these instructions cover configuring SolrCloud on a single machine. A production environment should feature multiple physical or virtual machines. These instructions also assume you’ve followed Installing and Configuring Solr above. Refer to the SolrCloud guide for more information.

  1. Stop the Solr server if it’s running.

  2. Navigate to the configsets folder in the Solr installation (solr-[version]/server/solr/configsets).

  3. Create a folder called liferay_configs.

  4. Copy the conf folder from solr-[version]/server/solr/liferay to the liferay_configs folder you just created.

    The configset/liferay_configs folder contains the SolrCloud Liferay collection configuration and is uploaded to ZooKeeper. When you copy the conf folder from the liferay server configured earlier, you use the schema.xml and solrconfig.xml files provided with the Liferay Solr Adapter.

  5. Launch an interactive SolrCloud session to configure your SolrCloud cluster. From the Solr installation root, run

    ./bin/solr -e cloud

  6. Complete the setup wizard. These steps demonstrate creating a two-node cluster:

    • Enter 2 for the number of nodes.

    • Specify ports 8983 and 7574 (the defaults). Both nodes are started with the start commands printed in the log:

      Starting up Solr on port 8983 using command:
"bin/solr" start -cloud -p 8983 -s "example/cloud/node1/solr"

Waiting up to 180 seconds to see Solr running on port 8983 [|]  [-]
Started Solr server on port 8983 (pid=8846). Happy searching!


Starting up Solr on port 7574 using command:
"bin/solr" start -cloud -p 7574 -s "example/cloud/node2/solr" -z localhost:9983

Waiting up to 180 seconds to see Solr running on port 7574 [|]  [/]
Started Solr server on port 7574 (pid=9026). Happy searching!

    • Name the collection liferay.

    • Split the collection into two shards.

    • Specify two replicas per shard.

    • When prompted to choose a configuration, enter liferay_configs. You should see a log message that concludes like this when the cluster has been started:

    SolrCloud example running, please visit http://localhost:8983/solr

Now you have a new collection called liferay in your local SolrCloud cluster. Verify its status by running the status command:

./bin/solr status

The log output states that the nodes are found and lists information for each node:

Found 2 Solr nodes:

Solr process 725273 running on port 8983
{
   "solr_home":"/home/me/_temp/solr-8.11.2/example/cloud/node1/solr",
   "version":"8.11.2 17dee71932c683e345508113523e764c3e4c80fa - mdrob - 2022-06-13 11:27:54",
   "startTime":"2023-01-05T20:29:45.779Z",
   "uptime":"0 days, 0 hours, 1 minutes, 29 seconds",
   "memory":"99.6 MB (%19.4) of 512 MB",
   "cloud":{
      "ZooKeeper":"localhost:9983",
      "liveNodes":"2",
      "collections":"1"}}
...

To stop Solr while running in SolrCloud mode, use the stop command, like this:

./bin/solr stop -all

Configure the Solr Connector for SolrCloud

To support SolrCloud in Liferay, specify the client type as CLOUD in Liferay’s Solr connector.

  1. From System Settings or your OSGi configuration file, set the Client Type to CLOUD.

    clientType="CLOUD"

  2. Start Liferay. If this is the first time starting after installing the Solr connector LPKG, follow the instructions in the log to restart Liferay.

From the Solr System Settings entry, set the Client Type to Cloud.

Solr Connector Configuration Reference

In addition to using configuration files, you can update the Solr 8 configuration using System Settings.

Configuring Solr from Liferay's System Settings application is most useful during development and testing.

Below are the default configurations along with settings that become available (in the System Settings Search category or configurable by .config file) when you install the Solr connector application. These settings accept a limited set of values:

Configuration File: com.liferay.portal.search.solr8.configuration.SolrConfiguration.config \

System Settings Entry: Solr 8

authenticationMode=["BASIC" or "CERT"]
clientType=["REPLICATED" or "CLOUD"]
defaultCollection="liferay"
logExceptionsOnly=B"true"
readURL="http://localhost:8983/solr/liferay"
writeURL="http://localhost:8983/solr/liferay"
zkHost="localhost:9983"

Configuration File: com.liferay.portal.search.solr8.configuration.SolrHttpClientFactoryConfiguration.config \

System Settings Entry: Solr 8 HTTP Client Factory

basicAuthPassword="solr"
basicAuthUserName="solr"
defaultMaxConnectionsPerRoute="20"
maxTotalConnections="20"

Configuration File: com.liferay.portal.search.solr8.configuration.SolrSSLSocketFactoryConfiguration.config \

System Settings Entry: Solr 8 SSL Factory

keyStorePassword="secret"
keyStorePath="classpath:/keystore.jks"
keyStoreType="JKS"
trustStorePassword="secret"
trustStorePath="classpath:/truststore.jks"
trustStoreType="JKS"
verifyServerCertificate=B"true"
verifyServerName=B"true"
Capability:
Search
Resource Type:
Official Documentation
Feature:
Search Engine Installation and Maintenance
Deployment Approach:
Liferay Self-Hosted