Global search

Installation

To use Solr as Moodle's search engine you need the PHP Solr extension and a Solr server.

PHP Solr extension

You need PHP Solr extension installed. You can download the official latest versions from [1](http://pecl.php.net/package/solr) The minimum required version is PECL Solr 2.1 for PHP 5 branch and PECL Solr 2.4 for PHP 7 branch.

Basic installation steps (using apache web server):

Linux (Debian/Ubuntu)

   sudo apt-get install libpcre3-dev libxml2-dev libcurl4-openssl-dev
   sudo apt-get install php5-dev
   sudo apt-get install php-pear
   sudo pecl install solr
   sudo service apache2 restart
   sudo sh -c "echo 'extension=solr.so' > /etc/php5/apache2/conf.d/solr.ini"
   sudo sh -c "echo 'extension=solr.so' > /etc/php5/cli/conf.d/solr.ini"

OSX using macports

   sudo port install apache-solr4
   sudo port install php54-solr

OSX using homebrew

   brew install homebrew/php/php56-solr

Windows

Install the pecl package as usual. Sorry it has not been tested yet.

Solr server

Moodle 3.1 supports Solr server from 4.0 onwards, although you can only use the Solr schema setup script that we provide with Moodle from Solr 5. The latest Solr 5 available version is the recommended one, same applicable to Solr 6 once it is released.

The following example snippet (feel free to copy & paste into a .sh script with execution permissions) will download Solr 5.4.1 (replace it with latest 5.x) in the current directory, start the solr server and create an index in it named moodle to add moodle data to it.

   #!/bin/bash
   set -e
   SOLRVERSION=5.4.1
   SOLRNAME=solr-$SOLRVERSION
   SOLRTAR=$SOLRNAME'.tgz'
   INDEXNAME=moodle
   if [ -d $SOLRNAME ]; then
       echo "Error: Directory $SOLRNAME already exists, remove it before starting the setup again."
       exit 1
   fi
   if [ ! -f $SOLRTAR ]; then
       wget http://apache.mirror.digitalpacific.com.au/lucene/solr/$SOLRVERSION/$SOLRTAR
   fi
   tar -xvzf $SOLRTAR
   cd $SOLRNAME
   bin/solr start
   bin/solr create -c $INDEXNAME
   # After setting it up and creating the index use:
   # - "/yourdirectory/solrdir/bin/solr start" from CLI to start the server
   # - "/yourdirectory/solrdir/bin/solr stop" from CLI to stop the server.

Setup

1. Go to Site administration -> Plugins -> Search -> Manage global search
2. Follow Search setup steps to complete the setup process. Basically you have to:
   1. Enable global search
   2. Set Solr as search engine and tick all search areas checkboxes
   3. Go to Site administration -> Plugins -> Search -> Solr and set Host name to localhost, Port to 8983 and Index name to 'moodle' (the name of the index in Solr)

Solr 4 schema setup

As mentioned above you can not use the schema setup script when using a Solr 4 server. Here you can find the field types description below in case you really want to use Solr 4.x branch.

Extracted from search/classes/document.php

Field name	Field type	Stored	Indexed	Query field
id	org.apache.solr.schema.StrField	true	false	false
itemid	org.apache.solr.schema.TrieIntField	true	true	false
title	org.apache.solr.schema.TextField	true	true	true
content	org.apache.solr.schema.TextField	true	true	true
contextid	org.apache.solr.schema.TrieIntField	true	true	false
areaid	org.apache.solr.schema.StrField	true	true	false
type	org.apache.solr.schema.TrieIntField	true	true	false
courseid	org.apache.solr.schema.TrieIntField	true	true	false
owneruserid	org.apache.solr.schema.TrieIntField	true	true	false
modified	org.apache.solr.schema.TrieDateField	true	true	false
userid	org.apache.solr.schema.TrieIntField	true	true	false
description1	org.apache.solr.schema.TextField	true	true	true
description2	org.apache.solr.schema.TextField	true	true	true
solr_filegroupingid	org.apache.solr.schema.StrField	true	true	false
solr_fileid	org.apache.solr.schema.StrField	true	true	false
solr_filecontenthash	org.apache.solr.schema.StrField	true	true	false
solr_fileindexstatus	org.apache.solr.schema.TrieIntField	true	true	false
solr_filecontent	org.apache.solr.schema.TextField	false	true	true

SSL Setup

If you are using Solr with SSL encryption, you will need to configure Moodle as such.

1. You will need a separate key file and cacert file, both in pem format, located on your server Moodle, and readable by the PHP process.
2. Go to Site administration > Plugins > Search > Solr
3. Set Secure mode to Yes
4. SSL certificate to /path/to/certs/solr-ssl.cacert.pem
5. SSL key to /path/to/certs/solr-ssl.key.pem
6. SSL key Password to The password used to lock the SSL Key
7. SSL CA certificates name to /path/to/certs/solr-ssl.cacert.pem
8. Save
9. On the search management page it should indicate it can connect to Solr.

Indexing

Once global search is enabled a new task will be running through cron, although you can force documents indexing by:

1. Going to Reports -> Global search info
2. Tick Index all site contents and press Execute

or

• Executing the following task from CLI

   php admin/tool/task/cli/schedule_task.php --execute="\\core\\task\\search_index_task"

Querying

1. Hover the search icon in the navigation bar, type your query and press Enter

or

1. Add Global search block somewhere
2. Type your query and press Search