[nodebb-plugin-solr] Solr search plugin

[julian]

Yes, @kinderjaje, when v0.1.0 was released (yesterday afternoon), I implemented it onto this forum, you can test it right now.

[mani]

@julian I want to use this plugin and I have updated lastest NodeBB and Solr, but when I run ./nodebb dev, I got these warns:

warn: [plugins/nodebb-plugin-solr] This plugin may not be compatible with your version of NodeBB. This may cause unintended behaviour or crashing.
warn: [plugins/nodebb-plugin-solr] In the event of an unresponsive NodeBB caused by this plugin, run ./nodebb reset plugin="nodebb-plugin-solr".

And when I use this I got some other errors. So what shoud I do to make this work?

[a_5mith]

Pylon can safely ignore warns about plugin incompatibility, this usually means that at some point in the future, a hook will be removed in favour for another one.

What are the errors you see when trying to actually run solr?

[trevor]

So we have to install Solr first, correct?

How To Install Solr on Ubuntu 14.04 | DigitalOcean

Solr is a search engine platform based on Apache Lucene. It is written in Java and uses the Lucene library to implement indexing.

(www.digitalocean.com)

...then install the plugin?

Can't wait for the inline-topic searching!
-_-
Installation Problem:
When I try accessing the Solr page via ACP, it gives me a 404 error. Any thoughts?

[trevor]

This post is deleted!

[mani]

@julian said:

npm install nodebb-plugin-solr

Maybe you should upgrade NodeBB to the latest.

[trevor]

@main It is updated to latest.

[mani]

I have the same problem before, but after update NodeBB and Solr plugin, it's gone. Have you updated all of that?

[trevor]

This is the error I'm getting:

warn: Plugin: /home/c/node_modules/nodebb-plugin-solr is corrupted or invalid. Please check plugin.json for errors.

I disabled all plugins @_@

I noticed theres a version difference in NPM and on Github.

[mani]

@a_5mith I can't build index and when I search got this error:

TypeError: Cannot read property 'response' of null
    at /var/local/swift/node_modules/nodebb-plugin-solr/library.js:173:11
    at ClientRequest.<anonymous> (/var/local/swift/node_modules/nodebb-plugin-solr/node_modules/solr-client/lib/solr.js:576:21)
    at ClientRequest.EventEmitter.emit (events.js:95:17)
    at Socket.socketErrorListener (http.js:1547:9)
    at Socket.EventEmitter.emit (events.js:95:17)
    at net.js:441:14
    at process._tickCallback (node.js:415:13)

[mani]

@trevor Yes, npm is the latest.

[mani]

@a_5mith I think it's because I didn't install Solr, so I'll install and try again.

[trevor]

Okay apparently it WASN'T updated to latest, lol. The following changes were made that fixed it; https://github.com/NodeBB/NodeBB/commit/7212f95582eb1e828ad6845a1b7f7f4dbb8b9e39

Thanks @main

[mani]

@trevor Thank you too, I just installed Solr by your instruction and make everything works!

[trevor]

Note: Installing and running Solr takes up a good bit of your CPU so if you're using DigitalOcean, I suggest you use the 10$/mo plan instead of the $5/mo.

[Guiri]

How does this plugin compare to the DB Search as far as features and accuracy?

[Haowei]

It works fine on our http://nodebb.org.cn

[julian]

Hi @Guiri, good question!

This plugin is closer to a traditional full-text search plugin you'd see in use on other sites. It's more powerful than a simple fulltext search, because we can do thing like word exclusions (e.g. forum -NodeBB), boosts (e.g. forum +punBB), and can even sort relevancy better by ranking documents higher if the searched terms are closer together, or are sequential (e.g. A search for Farmer John would rank This is a topic about Farmer John higher than John is a Farmer)

The existing search plugin uses phonetics to determine matches, which would cause problems when things had the same phonetic sounds, but were completely different words. (e.g. forum and farm are very different, but have the same consonants).

[julian]

Some development notes re: Solr

The default configuration saves topic titles in title_t and post content in description_t. These are defined in the default schema.xml shipped with Solr as:

<dynamicField name="*_t"  type="text_general"    indexed="true"  stored="true"/>

Setting stored to false would decrease the index size (and increase search efficiency by a small amount), as the actual post content would not be saved on-disk or in-memory.

Before, the index for this forum was about 7.5 MB. By setting stored to false, the index size is now 2.6 MB.

Would look into further customisation of the plugin (so you can define your own fields in schema.xml if you'd like) for the next version...

[Guiri]

Awesome, thanks for the quick reply. Is there a min-version, (e.g., nodebb 0.5.0) that's required or can I install it on my 0.4.3? I didn't see a min-version of nodebb specified in https://github.com/julianlam/nodebb-plugin-solr/blob/master/package.json