Implementing search with Haystack and Solr issues

Question

I'm trying to implement search to my django based website.

While following the tutorial I found this:

If you’re using the Solr backend, you have an extra step. Solr’s configuration is XML-based, so you’ll need to manually regenerate the schema. You should run ./manage.py build_solr_schema first, drop the XML output in your Solr’s schema.xml file and restart your Solr server.

First, I don't know where to put my schema.xml, after some resarch I figured I'd create a folder inside my project to put it: myprojectname/solr/schema.xml. Is that right?

Second, how do I restart Solr?

UPDATE

I downloaded Solr,unzipped it and I put the schema.xml generated inside example/solr/conf

then I start solr java -jar start.jar

but when I try to build the index : ./manage.py rebuild_index

I get :

WARNING: This will irreparably remove EVERYTHING from your search index.
Your choices after this are to restore from backups or rebuild via the `rebuild_index` command.
Are you sure you wish to continue? [y/N] y

Removing all documents from your index because you said so.
All documents removed.
Indexing 1 News.
Failed to add documents to Solr: [Reason: None]
<response><lst name="responseHeader"><int name="status">400</int><int    name="QTime">4</int></lst><lst name="error"><str name="msg">ERROR: [doc=news.news.2]   unknown field 'django_id'</str><int name="code">400</int></lst></response>
Indexing 1 entries.

Failed to add documents to Solr: [Reason: None]
<response><lst name="responseHeader"><int name="status">400</int><int name="QTime">17</int></lst><lst name="error"><str name="msg">ERROR: [doc=zinnia.entry.2] unknown field 'django_id'</str><int name="code">400</int></lst></response>

I verified my schema.xml ,and I do have :

<field name="django_ct" type="string" indexed="true" stored="true" multiValued="false" />
<field name="django_id" type="string" indexed="true" stored="true" multiValued="false" />

_{P.S.
I'm using Django 1.2 and Haystack 1.2.7}

important note: Haystack is not solr. it has adapters to interface with solr. You still need to have solr installed somewhere. websolr.com is pretty easy to get up and going with or install solr locally. — Francis Yaconiello

Francis Yaconiello Francis Yaconiello · Accepted Answer · 2012-11-05T16:49:08

The solr server needs to have a copy of your schema.xml not django. I usually keep a copy of the schema.xml in my django project for version control, but solr can't find it there.

Is you solr server local? Are you using a hosted or remote Solr service? I develop locally then use websolr b/c i dont want to configure solr for production.

For local dev on OSX

I'm assuming this is local development on OSX and that you have homebrew installed (assumptions - give me more info if this isnt the case):

brew install solr

This is going to install Solr at someplace like: /usr/local/Cellar/solr/...

Note: When im developing locally, I like to use fabric for running deployment and some startup tasks.

So in my fabfile.py I have a fabric command to copy my schema.xml into the proper file and start the solr server (I just run fab solr at the cmd line)

def solr() :
    # build a new updated schema.xml (changes to indexes/models may require this so always do it for local testing)
    local('python manage.py build_solr_schema > schema.xml')
    # copy the schema.xml into the proper directory
    local('cp schema.xml /usr/local/Cellar/solr/3.6.0/libexec/example/solr/conf/schema.xml')
    # start the solr server
    local('cd /usr/local/Cellar/solr/3.6.0/libexec/example && java -jar start.jar')

Note: you can run these commands on the command line if you dont use fabric

Implementing search with Haystack and Solr issues

2 Answers

For local dev on OSX