Drupal + Apache Solr = FAIL
August 21, 2009 - 11:48am — Francis
I've tried Apache Solr with Drupal but resulted in errors. Here's what happened on my two attempts:
- The first time, the Apache Solr integration module said it couldn't find Solr, although I installed it on my Tomcat server (used Acquia Drupal)
- On my second time, Drupal crashed with an error screen (used Drupal core)
It has (at time of writing) 124 open issues (total; bugs + feature requests + tasks + support requests) and out of the 124 open issues, 43 of them are bug reports. (that's a LOT)
So I insist not falling into the module's trick.
Comments
Thanks for trying my module
Sorry that you had some problems with it. Did you open an issue to report what had happened? Or is your experience possibly related to one of these issues which seem to have started about last week? http://drupal.org/node/555090 http://drupal.org/node/556446
I think it's possible that the very latest Solr nightly (the Java bit) has an incompatibility that we have to adjust to. This is the downside of tracking their development branch. The upside is that Solr 1.4 should be released soon and then we'll have a stable Solr to develop against.
As for your analysis of the issue queue, it's not very good. First, you want to take a look at how active the issue queue is, and how many people are involved. This page lists the last 50 issues that have been active: http://is.gd/2tqhM
Note that there are only 4 issues that have not received replies, and that 12 of the issues are marked "fixed".
Then you'll want to look at the number of committers, and how active they are: http://drupal.org/node/204268/committers
All 7 people who have committed to the project are still highly active in the project. This is a good sign.
Then it's useful to look at the usage statistics: http://drupal.org/project/usage/apachesolr
Nearly 1,500 sites report using this module. If nobody could get it working it would certainly be closer to zero. Also, as you can discern from Acquia's reports on the number of customers they have, only the smallest percent of those 1,500 are running Acquia Search (where Acquia hosts the Java part for you). So if the usage statistics are real (and I don't believe they can always be trusted - note the weird inflation in the reporting that happened betwee June 14 and July 12), over 1,000 sites use the module and host the Java bit themselves.
The final thing you need to know about the issue queue is that it is used for communicating intent and future plans. A great number of the issues are opened by me saying things like "Let's refactor this bit" or "The way we do this now can be improved" or "How are we going to get feature X in there?"
An interesting comparison would be the Views project - the most popular contrib module. It has 1,285 open issues including 531 open bugs! Is that also a FAIL?
A little hasty
I was being a little too hasty, possibly it could be a problem with Solr 1.3
Success!
I didn't read the README file before attempting to use solr. And, i can use it finally!
Which branch? DRUPAL-5 or DRUPAL-6?
The DRUPAL-5 branch is poorly supported. All the action has been in the DRUPAL-6 branch. I just found a willing DRUPAL-5 branch maintainer, however, and he has pledged to work towards a stable DRUPAL-5 release that closes some of the outstanding known bugs. That said, the module does work, granted you set it up right. And, it is a revolution in Drupal search.
DRUPAL-6
I was using the DRUPAL-6 branch, but the documentation said that anything 6.x-beta6 or higher will require Solr 1.4, i was using the wrong version.
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