collective.solr - Solr integration for the Plone CMS

December 8, 2025 · View on GitHub

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collective.solr integrates the Solr_ search engine with Plone_.

Apache Solr is based on Lucene and is the enterprise open source search engine. It powers the search of sites like Twitter, the Apple and iTunes Stores, Wikipedia, Netflix and many more.

Solr does not only scale to any level of content, but provides rich search functionality, like faceting, geospatial search, suggestions, spelling corrections, indexing of binary formats and a whole variety of powerful tools to configure custom search solutions. It has integrated clustering and load-balancing to provide a high level of robustness.

collective.solr comes with a default configuration and setup of Solr that makes it extremely easy to get started, yet provides a vastly superior search quality compared to Plone's integrated text search based on ZCTextIndex.

Features

Solr Features

  • Schema and Schemaless Configuration
  • Information Retrieval System
  • Speed (in comparission to ZCTextIndex)

Features of Solr Integration into Plone

Search Enhancements

  • Facets
  • Indexing of binary documents
  • Spellchecking / suggestions
  • Wildcard searches
  • Exclude from search
  • Elevation

Detailed Documentation

A full Documentation of the Solr integration of Plone could be found on collectivesolr.readthedocs.org_.

.. _collectivesolr.readthedocs.org: https://collectivesolr.readthedocs.org/en/latest/

Installation & Configuration

Download the latest default Solr configuration from github::

$ wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/collective/collective.solr/master/solr-9.9.x.cfg

.. note: Please do not extend your buildout directly with those files since they are likely to change over time. Always fetch the files via wget to have a stable local copy. In general you should never rely on extending buildout config files from servers that aren't under your control.

Extend your buildout to use those files and make sure collective.solr is added to the eggs in your instance section. Your full buildout file should look something like this::

[buildout] parts += instance extends = https://dist.plone.org/release/6.1.3/versions.cfg solr-9.10.x.cfg

[instance] recipe = plone.recipe.zope2instance http-address = 8080 user = admin:admin eggs = Plone collective.solr

After saving this to let's say buildout.cfg, the buildout can be run and the Solr_ server and Plone_ instance started::

python3−mvenvpy3python3 -m venv py3 py3/bin/pip install -r https://dist.plone.org/release/6.1.3/requirements.txt py3/bin/buildout...py3/bin/buildout ... bin/solr-instance start $ bin/instance start

Next you should activate the collective.solr (site search) add-on in the add-on control panel of Plone. After activation you should review the settings in the new Solr Settings control panel. To index all your content in Solr you can call the provided maintenance view::

http://localhost:8080/plone/@@solr-maintenance/reindex

Solr connection configuration in ZCML

The connections settings for Solr can be configured in ZCML and thus in buildout. This makes it easier when copying databases between multiple Zope instances with different Solr servers.

Example::

zcml-additional =
    <configure xmlns:solr="http://namespaces.plone.org/solr">
        <solr:connection host="localhost" port="8983" base="/solr/plone"/>
   </configure>

Development build

If you have a checkout of collective.solr, you can spin up a working installation with::

make all bin/solr-start bin/instance fg

Instead of running bin/solr-start you may want to run bin/solr-foreground in a separate terminal so you can see what Solr is doing.

Then:

  • Create a Plone site
  • In Site Setup >> Add-ons: install collective.solr
  • In Site Setup >> Solr settings: activate solr integration
  • In Site Setup >> Solr settings: open the "Solr Reindex" link @@solr-maintenance/reindex

You can verify Solr indexing worked by opening http://localhost:8983/solr/#/plone/query and hitting the button "Execute Query". In a vanilla Classic site with example content, that should show 6 results.

Current Project Status

The code is used in production in many sites and considered stable. This add-on can be installed in a Plone_ 4.3 (or later) site to enable indexing operations as well as searching (site and live search) using Solr. Doing so will not only significantly improve search quality and performance - especially for a large number of indexed objects, but also reduce the memory footprint of your Plone instance by allowing you to remove the SearchableText, Description and Title indexes from the catalog as well as the lexicons if no other indexes are using them.

In large sites with 100000 content objects and more, searches using ZCTextIndex often taken 10 seconds or more and require a good deal of memory from ZODB caches. Solr will typically answer these requests in 10ms to 50ms at which point network latency and the rendering speed of Plone's page templates are a more dominant factor.

Plone Compatibility

collective.solr works with Plone 6. Use older versions of collective.solr if you're using an older Plone version.

Python Compatibility

collective.solr works with Python 3.10+.

Solr Compatibility

collective.solr works with Solr 9. Older versions might work as well but we do not test them.

Bug Reporting & Development

Releases can be found on the Python Package Index at https://pypi.org/project/collective.solr. The code and issue trackers can be found on GitHub at https://github.com/collective/collective.solr.

For outstanding issues and features remaining to be implemented please see the issue tracker__.

.. __: https://github.com/collective/collective.solr/issues

.. _Solr: https://lucene.apache.org/solr/ .. _Plone: https://www.plone.org/