This plugin adds full text search capabilities and many other nifty features from Apache's Solr to any Rails model. It was based on the first draft by Erik Hatcher.

This plugin is intended for use in old versions of Rails. For newer versions, I strongly advice using Sunspot! Nevertheless, this plugin is used for Noosfero project in production. Any problem please open an issue.

It should support Rails 2.1 (and greater 2.x) and is developed latest Solr versions, so don't expect it to run on older Solr.

Install as a plugin

script/plugin install git://github.com/brauliobo/acts_as_solr_reloaded.git

Download Solr

rake solr:download

• Java Runtime Environment(JRE) 6.0 (or newer) from Oracle or OpenJDK

See config/solr.yml file.

For solr configuration the important files are solrconfig.xml and schema.xml.

Just include the line below to any of your ActiveRecord models:

acts_as_solr

Or if you want, you can specify only the fields that should be indexed:

acts_as_solr :fields => [:name, :author]

Then to find instances of your model, just do:

Model.search(query) #query is a string representing your query

Please see ActsAsSolr::ActsMethods for a complete info

ActsAsSolr implements in SearchResults class an interface compatible with will_paginate and maybe others.

To test code that uses acts_as_solr you must start a Solr server for the test environment. You can add to the beginning of your test/test_helper.rb the code:

ENV["RAILS_ENV"] = "test"
abort unless system 'rake solr:start' 
at_exit { system 'rake solr:stop' }

However, if you would like to mock out Solr calls so that a Solr server is not needed (and your tests will run much faster), just add this to your test_helper.rb or similar:

class ActsAsSolr::Post
  def self.execute(request)
    true
  end
end

Or to be more realistic and preserve performance, enable Solr when needed, by calling TestSolr.enable and disable solr otherwise by calling TestSolr.disable on Test::Unit::TestCase's setup:

 class ActsAsSolr::Post
   class << self
     alias_method :execute_orig, :execute
   end
 end
 module ActsAsSolr::ParserMethods
   alias_method :parse_results_orig, :parse_results
 end
 
 class TestSolr
 
   def self.enable
     ActsAsSolr::Post.class_eval do
       def self.execute(*args)
         execute_orig *args
       end
     end
     ActsAsSolr::ParserMethods.module_eval do
       def parse_results(*args)
         parse_results_orig *args
       end
     end
 
     # clear index
     ActsAsSolr::Post.execute(Solr::Request::Delete.new(:query => '*:*'))
 
     @solr_disabled = false
   end
 
   def self.disable
     return if @solr_disabled
 
     ActsAsSolr::Post.class_eval do
       def self.execute(*args)
         true
       end
     end
     ActsAsSolr::ParserMethods.module_eval do
       def parse_results(*args)
         parse_results_orig nil, args[1]
       end
     end
 
     @solr_disabled = true
   end
 
 end
 
 # disable solr actions by default
 TestSolr.disable

Released under the MIT license.