Solr4Mage
Solr4Mage
Introduction
If you have a Magento web store with a big catalog, or with a large data collection that users can browse, more than certainly you've wondered about how to improve the search on your site.
Magento's search system is not bad. In fact, considering the underlying technology, it's pretty good: it makes good use of MySQL's strengths, and with some tuning effort (well, OK, a lot of effort) you can even get pretty decent performance for large datasets. You will have to put in a lot of caching and SQL tuning tricks, though, and your magic could only be short-lived anyway... What would happen if your site becomes twice as popular due to a good marketing move?
If our only weapon is MySQL, this can feel like a curse rather than a blessing. Luckily for us, there is a better solution available!
Enter Apache Solr!
What is Apache Solr?
The Wikipedia says:
Solr is an 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. Providing distributed search and index replication, Solr is highly scalable. Solr is written in Java and runs as a standalone full-text search server within a servlet container such as Apache Tomcat. Solr uses the Lucene Java search library at its core for full-text indexing and search, and has REST-like HTTP/XML and JSON APIs that make it easy to use from virtually any programming language. Solr's powerful external configuration allows it to be tailored to almost any type of application without Java coding, and it has an extensive plugin architecture when more advanced customization is required.
You can find more good info about Apache Solr in these locations:
- Solr official site. The authoritative place to start, and to download it.
- This complete starting up tutorial.
- Another starting up tutorial
- More Solr resources to explore.
And what do we say? Solr rules! It is amazingly fast, configurable and it opens up a lot of possibilities that would be unthinkable without it.
Solr and Magento? Solr4Mage!
The Solr/Magento integration is still a bit immature, though. A web search will return lots of people asking how to do it, but we couldn't find any good answers. That's why we decided to roll up our sleeves and contribute to help improve this situation, creating this extension.
Our goal is to provide a solid integration with Solr, allowing an easy and complete interaction within Magento and Solr.
We wanted to provide a future-proof extension, so our extension could evolve alongside with the evolution of both Magento and Solr. For that reason, we leveraged existing open source components that provide a solid foundation to work with Solr from PHP (for example, we are using Solarium as our way to communicate with Solr).
This allows our extension to support different versions of Solr (3.x, 4.x) while simplifying its architecture and overall complexity without sacrificing power.
We have also developed it with extensive unit tests coverage, using the testing mechanisms from Magento 2, which we "backported" to Magento 1.
This first version of the extension covers the basic use cases for the search, including the search, the advanced search, the catalog navigation and the faceted search.
The indexing of Solr is performed from within Magento (we have added a new indexer for that, that will be available as the rest).
Installation & Configuration
- Copy the contents of the directory 'resources' inside the extension's directory to your Solr configuration folder
- Log into the Magento admin panel, and setup your Solr server credentials under System / Configuration / Summa / Solr4Mage and save
- Select from the dropdown 'Search Engine' inside System / Configuration / Catalog / Catalog / Catalog Search the option 'Solr4Mage' and save
- Reindex your data under System / Index Management
- That's it!
More info
This extension is developed and maintained by Summa Solutions, Magento Gold Solution Partner.
We will continue evolving the extension with many more features, so stay tuned!
