New year, new Solr, new features

After ending 2016 with a new PHP version and starting 2017 with a new HTTP version, we’re happy to report that there’s still plenty of new left for us to launch. This time around it’s a new Apache Solr version, 6.3.

Support for a more modern version of Apache Solr has been one of our most requested features for a while. Unfortunately some packaging issues made it more difficult than we expected but I’m happy to report that we’ve managed to work around them. Starting today, you can now launch a Solr 6 container by simply specifying the appropriate version in your  services.yaml  file, like so:

solrsearch:
    type: 'solr:6.3'
    disk: 1024

However, you can also go a lot farther than that.

The Solr 6 container is also our first container to support multiple databases (“cores” in Solr-speak) on a single service. Each core can have its own schema and custom configuration, and each can be mapped to a different “endpoint”, which can then be accessed by your application container. See our documentation for more details. Over time we intend to add similar functionality to other services, too.

Please note that multi-core support is only available on Solr 6.3, not on older Solr versions. Also, Solr doesn’t support direct upgrades from one major version to another. If you want to upgrade your existing Solr service, create a new, additional Solr service with a new name, populate it from your application, then remove the old one.