Laravel Solr

Published on November 5th, 2024 by Yannick Lyn Fatt

If you have ever had a need to implement search into your application you've probably heard of Apache Solr. Solr is a fast, open source search platform built on the full-text, vector, and geospatial search capabilities of Apache Lucene.

Developer Haider Jabbar Abdullah has built a package called Laravel-Solr to provide a seamless integration with Apache Solr. This will allow Laravel developers to efficiently utilize Solr’s powerful search capabilities right in their applications.

Key Features

Easy installation and setup
Comprehensive methods for indexing and searching
Built-in support for common use cases
Well-documented and user-friendly

To install this package, run:

composer require haiderjabbar/laravelsolr

Next, add the service provider to your config/app.php:

'providers' => [
    // ...
    haiderjabbar\laravelsolr\LaravelSolrServiceProvider::class,
];

You should also publish the config/solr.php config file with:

php artisan vendor:publish --provider="haiderjabbar\laravelsolr\LaravelSolrServiceProvider"

Once you have this setup, you will want to create a core (if one does not already exist). In Solr, the term core is used to refer to a single index and associated transaction log. You can have multiple cores if needed and in doing so it will allow you to index data with different structures in the same server. This can also give you more control over how your data is presented to different audiences.

# Create a new Solr core and migration file
php artisan solr:create-core coreName

Now you can begin to add documents. Documents are Solr’s basic unit of information and it is just a set of data that describes something. So a document about a book could contain the title, author, year of publication, number of pages, and so on. When you add a document, Solr takes that information and adds it to an index. When you perform a query, Solr can quickly consult the index and return the matching documents.

We will need to define the fields that our documents will have and to do so we can run:

# Create new Solr fields with optional parent and fields
php artisan solr:create-fields coreName

This command will allow you to specify the name, type and whether or not the field is multi-valued, should be required or indexed.

When you have defined your fields you can begin to add a documents and to do so you could write:

use haiderjabbar\laravelsolr\Models\SolrModel;
 
$coreName = 'your_core_name';
$data = [
    'id' => 'unique_id',
    'name' => 'document_name',
    // ... other fields
];
 
$result = SolrModel::addDocument($coreName, $data);

The Laravel-Solr package also comes with a QueryBuilder which allows you to have a familiar interface to search and return documents.

use haiderjabbar\laravelsolr\Services\SolrQueryBuilder;
 
$builder = new SolrQueryBuilder($coreName);
 
// Basic search
$builder->search('field', '=', 'value', $boost);
 
// Where clause
$builder->where('field', '=', 'value', $priority);
 
// Sort and Paginate
$builder
    ->sort('field asc')    // Add sorting
    ->start(0)             // Starting offset (pagination)
    ->rows(10);            // Number of rows to return
 
$results = $builder->get();

Additional Commands

# Update a Solr core with a new name
php artisan solr:update-core
 
# Delete a Solr core and its migration file
php artisan solr:delete-core coreName
 
# Update existing Solr core fields
php artisan solr:update-fields
 
# Delete fields from a Solr core
php artisan solr:delete-fields