Searches are an integral part of any web application that is built today. Whether it is a content site, a job site, an e-commerce site, or any other website, searches play a very important role in helping the user locate the information that he/she is looking for. As a developer, it is imperative to provide the user of the website with all the possible tools for searching and narrowing down to the required information. Apache Solr is a full text search engine, which provides a large list of features for searches. PHP is the preferred programming language for building websites. This book guides the reader on the integration between PHP and Solr.
When a user performs a search on the website, he wants the results to be relevant based on certain criteria. Let us take the example of an e-commerce website. A search can happen on product names, brand names, model numbers, and product types. Once the results are visible, it is important to provide a set of facets on price, size, and some other features of the products in the search result, which can be used to narrow down the results to exactly what is desired. Autocompleting the search query as the user types and providing spelling suggestions are some of the advanced search functionalities that are visible on some websites.
The idea of this book is to bring attention to these and many other search functionalities that Solr provides to the community of PHP developers and to guide PHP developers who build these websites on exploring and using these search functionalities to build features related to searches into their websites. This book not only provides a quick step-by-step PHP code for fast development of search features but also goes in depth on how the feature actually works on the Solr end. Configurations and tweaking options in Solr and PHP are also discussed for advanced users to help them tweak the functionality as per their requirements.
This book will start with installation of Solr, adding, updating, and deleting documents on Solr using PHP and then exploring the features provided by the Solr search. We will explore the features provided by Solr such as faceting, grouping, boosting, and sorting of results. We will build a spell check and a query autocomplete feature provided by Solr. We will also look at advanced features for scaling search. This book will provide an end-to-end practical guide to building a full featured search application using PHP and Solr.
Chapter 1, Installing and Integrating Solr and PHP, introduces Solr and installs and integrates Solr with PHP on both Windows and Linux environments.
Chapter 2, Inserting, Updating, and Deleting Documents from Solr, provides practical examples on how to use PHP to add, modify, and delete documents from the Solr index.
Chapter 3, Select Query on Solr and Query Modes (DisMax/eDisMax), explains how to run basic search queries on Solr and use different query modes to run some advanced search queries.
Chapter 4, Advanced Queries – Filter Queries and Faceting, digs deeper into search queries and provides practical examples for running filter queries and facets using Solr and PHP.
Chapter 5, Highlighting Results Using PHP and Solr, explains how Solr can be configured for highlighting search results and provides practical examples in PHP for highlighting.
Chapter 6, Debug and Stats Component, explains how Solr calculates relevance, ranks the results of a search query, and explains how index statistics can be obtained.
Chapter 7, Spell Check in Solr, configures Solr for spell check and provides practical example of an autocomplete feature built using PHP and Solr.
Chapter 8, Advanced Solr – Grouping, the MoreLikeThis Query, and Distributed Search, goes in depth on some of the advanced topics in Solr and also explains how Solr can be scaled horizontally.
You will need a Windows or Linux machine with Apache Web Server configured to run PHP scripts. A file editor for writing code and a web browser to check the output of code execution will be needed. We will be downloading, installing, and configuring Solr as required.
This book is for PHP developers who need to build and integrate search into their applications. No prior knowledge of Solr is required. Understanding of object oriented programming using PHP would be helpful. Readers should be familiar with the concept of web applications.
In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in the text are shown as follows: "Call the createPing()function to create the ping query."
A block of code is set as follows:
$config = array(
"endpoint" => array("localhost" => array("host"=>"127.0.0.1",
"port"=>"8080", "path"=>"/solr", "core"=>"collection1",)
) );Any command-line input or output is written as follows:
cd ~/solr-4.3.1/example java –jar start.jar
New terms and important words are shown in italics. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "Select collection1 from the dropdown on the left-hand panel. Click on ping and you will see the ping time in milliseconds appear next to the ping link".
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