Just as you would for Drupal, you should always test your search configuration prior to deploying it to production. In this tutorial, we examine the various ways to set up Apache Solr locally on your system. Then we'll walk through setting up DDEV with Solr for local development.
In this tutorial, we'll:
- Describe options for running Solr locally
- List which popular local development environments provide Solr
- Show how to set up a local, DDEV-based local dev environment with Solr
By the end of this tutorial you should be able to list the different ways that Solr can be installed locally, choose an option that works for you, and see how to get started quickly with DDEV.
Goal
Set up a local web development environment with Solr.
Prerequisites
If you're using Docker:
Local development environments that support Solr
Natively installed web development environments like MAMP and Acquia Dev Desktop do not support Solr out of the box. Instead, you need to install Solr as you would a standalone server application. This can make these environments less desirable for doing search development. It is possible to install Solr natively, we recommend looking up the official documentation for your OS.
Many virtualized web development environments offer Solr as an optional extra:
We'll use DDEV in our example; but, once you've got Solr installed for your environment the only difference in the instructions for the rest of this course will be in entering the environment-specific configuration details that Drupal requires to connect to Solr.
Solr Cloud versus Single Core
Solr can be run in cloud mode via SolrCloud (modern), or in single core mode (classic). Either will work for local development. The difference is that Solr running in Cloud mode exposes a Configset API that allows Drupal to update Solr's configuration without requiring you to manually update configuration files.
For local development your options are to either run classic standalone Solr with a single core (more on cores later), or Solr in cloud mode with a single node.
The official Solr documentation provides detailed instructions on installing and running Solr and SolrCloud. As well as Docker images, and plenty of examples.
Add Solr to DDEV
For the rest of this series we need Solr running locally so we can walk through integrating it with Drupal. Let's walk through setting up Solr with DDEV for local development.
Pick a DDEV addon
There are two common approaches to adding Solr to DDEV, pick one:
- ddev-solr: Maintained, and recommended, by the Search API Solr module maintainers. Provides Solr (Cloud) using a single Solr node.
- ddev-drupal9-solr: Official DDEV plugin, provides Solr running in the "classic standalone" mode using a single core.
Install the selected addon
Install the addon:
ddev get mkalkbrenner/ddev-solr
Restart ddev:
ddev restart
Verify Solr is running
Once DDEV is up and running, access Solr's UI in browser by opening http://.ddev.site:8983. For example, if the project is named "myproject" the hostname will be http://myproject.ddev.site:8983.
Recap
There are many options for running Solr locally on your system. While you can install it natively, most often you will rely on your web development environment's preferred Solr installation method. For this series, we will be using DDEV and the ddev-solr addon to work with Drupal and Search API.
Further your understanding
- Why use SolrCloud vs. Solr classic for local development?
Additional resources
- Search API Solr module's README (git.drupalcode.org) has instructions for various other approaches to setting up Solr locally, including templates for custom Docker containers. (git.drupalcode.org)
- DDEV - Additional Service Configuration (ddev.readthedocs.io)
- Docker installation on docs.docker.com (docs.docker.com)