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Configure Solr

Configure boosting

Index time boosting

Index time boosting was deprecated in Solr 6.5 and removed in Solr 7.0. Until query time boosting is implemented, there is no way to boost in the bundle out of the box.

How boosting interacts with Search API

Boosting of fields or documents will affect the score (relevance) of your search result hits when using Search API for any Criteria you specify on $query->query, or in REST by using Query element. When you don't specify anything to sort on, the result will be sorted by this relevance. Anything set on $query->filter, or in REST using Filter element, will not affect scoring and only works as a pure filter for the result. Thus make sure to place Criteria you want to affect scoring on query.

Boosting currently happens when indexing, so if you change your configuration you will need to re-index.

Boosting tells the search engine which parts of the content model have more importance when searching, and is an important part of tuning your search results relevance. Importance is defined using a numeric value, where 1.0 is default, values higher than that are more important, and values lower (down to 0.0) are less important.

Boosting is configured per connection that you configure to use for a given Repository, like in this config/packages/ibexa_solr.yaml example:

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ibexa_solr:
    connections:
        default:
            boost_factors:
                content_type:
                    # Boost a whole content type
                    article: 2.0
                meta_field:
                    # Boost a meta Field (name, text) system wide, or for a given content type
                    name: 10.0
                    article:
                        # Boost the meta full text Field for article more than 2.0 set above
                        text: 5.0

The configuration above will result in the following boosting (content type / Field):

  • article/title: 2.0
  • news/description: 1.0 (default)
  • article/text (meta): 5.0
  • blog_post/name (meta): 10.0
  • article/name (meta): 2.0

How to configure boosting on specific fields

Currently, boosting on particular fields is missing. However, it could be configured using 3rd party Novactive/NovaeZSolrSearchExtraBundle in case of custom search implementation, e.g. to handle your front-end search form. Unfortunately, this doesn't affect search performed in the administration interface.

The following example presents boosting configuration for Folder's name and description fields. First, in ibexa_solr.yaml configure custom fulltext fields.

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ez_solr_search_extra:
    system:
        default:
            fulltext_fields:
                custom_folder_name:
                    - folder/name
                custom_folder_description:
                    - folder/description

The second step requires you to use \Novactive\EzSolrSearchExtra\Query\Content\Criterion\MultipleFieldsFullText instead of default \Ibexa\Contracts\Core\Repository\Values\Content\Query\Criterion\FullText. The following example shows custom query which benefits from the custom fields created in the previous example.

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<?php

namespace App\Controller;

use Ibexa\Contracts\Core\Repository\SearchService;
use Ibexa\Contracts\Core\Repository\Values\Content\Query;
use Symfony\Component\HttpFoundation\Request;
use Symfony\Component\HttpFoundation\Response;

class SearchController
{
    /**
     * @var \Ibexa\Contracts\Core\Repository\SearchService
     */
    private $searchService;

    public function __construct(SearchService $searchService)
    {
        $this->searchService = $searchService;
    }

    public function searchAction(Request $request): Response
    {
        $queryString = $request->get('query');

        $query = new Query();
        $query->query = new \Novactive\EzSolrSearchExtra\Query\Content\Criterion\MultipleFieldsFullText(
            $queryString,
            [
                'metaBoost' => [
                    'custom_folder_name' => 20.0,
                    'custom_folder_description' => 10.0,
                ]
            ]
        );

        $searchResult = $this->searchService->findContent($query);

        ...
    }
}

Remember to clear the cache and perform search engine reindex afterwords.

The above configuration will result in the following boosting (content type / Field):

  • folder/name: 20.0
  • folder/description: 10.0

You can use indexation of related objects to search through text of related content. Indexing is disabled by default. To set it up you need to define the maximum indexing depth using the following YAML configuration:

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ibexa_solr:
    # ...
    connections:
        default:
            # ...
            indexing_depth:
                # Default value: 0 - no relation indexing, 1 - direct relations, 2nd level  relations, 3rd level  relations (maximum value).
                default: 1      
                content_type:
                    # Index depth defined for specific content type
                    article: 2

Configure Solr Replication (master/slave)

Note

The configuration below has been tested on Solr 7.7.

Configure Master for replication

First you need to change the core configuration in solrconfig.xml (for example */opt/solr/server/ibexa/collection1/conf/solrconfig.xml). You can copy and paste the code below before any other requestHandler section.

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<requestHandler name="/replication" class="solr.ReplicationHandler">
  <lst name="master">
    <str name="replicateAfter">optimize</str>
    <str name="backupAfter">optimize</str>
    <str name="confFiles">schema.xml,stopwords.txt,elevate.xml</str>
    <str name="commitReserveDuration">00:00:10</str>
  </lst>
  <int name="maxNumberOfBackups">2</int>
  <lst name="invariants">
    <str name="maxWriteMBPerSec">16</str>
  </lst>
</requestHandler>
<str name="confFiles">solrconfig_slave.xml:solrconfig.xml,x.xml,y.xml</str>

Then restart the master with:

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sudo su - solr -c "/opt/solr/bin/solr restart"

Configure Slave for replication

You have to edit the same file on the slave server, and use the code below:

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<requestHandler name="/replication" class="solr.ReplicationHandler">
  <lst name="slave">

    <!-- fully qualified url for the replication handler of master. It is
         possible to pass on this as a request param for the fetchindex command -->
    <str name="masterUrl">http://123.456.789.0:8983/solr/collection1/replication</str>

    <!-- Interval in which the slave should poll master.  Format is HH:mm:ss .
         If this is absent slave does not poll automatically.
         But a fetchindex can be triggered from the admin or the http API -->
    <str name="pollInterval">00:00:20</str>

    <!-- THE FOLLOWING PARAMETERS ARE USUALLY NOT REQUIRED-->
    <!-- To use compression while transferring the index files. The possible
         values are internal|external.  If the value is 'external' make sure
         that your master Solr has the settings to honor the accept-encoding header.
         See here for details: http://wiki.apache.org/solr/SolrHttpCompression
         If it is 'internal' everything will be taken care of automatically.
         USE THIS ONLY IF YOUR BANDWIDTH IS LOW.
         THIS CAN ACTUALLY SLOWDOWN REPLICATION IN A LAN -->
    <str name="compression">internal</str>

    <!-- The following values are used when the slave connects to the master to
         download the index files.  Default values implicitly set as 5000ms and
         10000ms respectively. The user DOES NOT need to specify these unless the
         bandwidth is extremely low or if there is an extremely high latency -->
    <str name="httpConnTimeout">5000</str>
    <str name="httpReadTimeout">10000</str>

    <!-- If HTTP Basic authentication is enabled on the master, then the slave
         can be configured with the following -->
    <str name="httpBasicAuthUser">username</str>
    <str name="httpBasicAuthPassword">password</str>
  </lst>
</requestHandler>

Next, restart Solr slave.

Connect to the Solr slave interface (http://localhost:8983/solr), go to your core and check the replication status:

Solr Slave

Configure HTTP Client for Solr queries

Ibexa Solr Bundle uses Symfony HTTP Client to fetch and update Solr index. You can configure timeout and maximum number of retries for that client using Solr Bundle's Semantic configuration:

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ibexa_solr:
    # ...
    http_client:
        # ...
        timeout: 30
        max_retries: 5

Extend Solr

To learn how you can create document field mappers, custom Search Criteria, custom Sort Clauses and Aggregations, see Search extensibility.