Running ArchivesSpace with external Solr
For ArchivesSpace > 3.1.1 this is required. For previous versions it is optional.
Supported Solr Versions
**Note: ArchivesSpace does NOT currently support Solr 9. Using the latest version of Solr 8 is recommended at this time.
ArchivesSpace “officially” supports the version indicated in solrconfig.xml. That refers to a version that is used for development and tested between release cycles.
If you are already running Solr externally using a configuration derived from a 3.1.1 or
earlier ArchivesSpace then it should continue to work, as for the transition from embedded
to external Solr the configuration files have only been updated to resolve deprecations.
To support a custom set of Solr configuration files (i.e. not the exact files provided
with an ArchivesSpace release), however, you must set AppConfig[:solr_verify_checksums] = false
in config.rb
.
Alternatively if you would like to use the verify checksums feature you can place a copy of your
schema and solrconfig xml files in the ArchivesSpace release solr
directory, overwriting those
provided by ArchivesSpace.
Note: the ArchivesSpace Program Team can only provide support for Solr deployments using the “officially” supported version with the standard configuration provided by the application. Everything else will be treated as “best effort” community-led support.
Install Solr
Refer to the Solr documentation for instructions on setting up Solr on your server.
You will download the Solr package and extract it to a folder of your choosing. Do not start Solr until you have added the ArchivesSpace configuration files.
We strongly recommend a standalone mode installation. No support will be provided for Solr Cloud deployments specifically (i.e. we cannot help troubleshoot Zookeeper).
Create a configset
Before running Solr you will need to setup a configset.
Linux
Using the command line:
Be sure to replace /$path/$to/$solr
with your actual Solr location, which might be something like:
Windows
Right click on your Solr directory and open in Windows Terminal (Powershell).
You should see something like this in response:
Copy the ArchivesSpace Solr configuration files from the solr
directory included
with the release into the $SOLR_HOME/server/solr/configsets/archivesspace/conf
directory.
There should be four files:
- schema.xml
- solrconfig.xml
- stopwords.txt
- synonyms.txt
Note: your exact output may be slightly different.
Setup a Solr core
With the configset
in place run the command to create an ArchivesSpace core:
Wait for Solr to start (running as a non-admin user):
You can check that Solr is running on http://localhost:8983.
Now create the core:
You should see confirmation:
In the browser you should be able to access the ArchivesSpace schema.
Disable the embedded server Solr instance (optional <= 3.1.1 only)
Edit the ArchivesSpace config.rb file:
Note that doing this means that you will have to backup Solr manually.
Set the Solr url in your config.rb file
This config setting should point to your Solr instance:
If you are not running ArchivesSpace and Solr on the same server, update
localhost
to your Solr address.
By default, on startup, ArchivesSpace will check that the Solr configuration
appears to be correct and will raise an error if not. You can disable this check
by setting AppConfig[:solr_verify_checksums] = false
in config.rb
.
Please note: if you’re upgrading an existing installation of ArchivesSpace to use an external Solr, you will need to trigger a full re-index. Instructions for this are in Indexes .
You can now follow the instructions in the Getting started section to start your ArchivesSpace application.