PROGRAMMING // SEARCH ENGINES

Getting Started With Apache Solr

Or… How to get Solr up and running, with an understanding of the underlying technology — and a hint of SEO URLs

Photo by Marten Newhall on Unsplash

Apache Solr was one of the first faceted search engines, it is open source and powers some of the largest sites in the world.

There is plenty of information to get examples up and running, however, it doesn’t go into the background on how to start your project.

There is plenty of magic in tutorials on the web — when you need to go deeper, you then get stuck

This is a “no-magic” approach to Solr — you will learn and understand what is going on.

The basics

I first started working with Solr about 15 years ago, and a lot has changed since those early days, faceted search was still in its infancy, but now it is everywhere. Admittedly, a lot of people have migrated to the managed Elasticsearch option — which I can understand — however, there are some problems with Elastic’s open source license…

The interest over time for Solr (in blue) versus Elasticsearch (in red) can easily be seen.