Using Docker Playground to Run Solr

Recently, I wanted to run through some Solr documentation, and I wanted a clean Solr instance with demo contents. I was able to do this pretty cleanly on the Play with Docker site (requires a free Docker account).  

Here are the steps:

Go to Play with Docker: https://labs.play-with-docker.com/

Click Add New Instance.

Zapping Solr Cores with Powershell

Imagine you've been working on a feature that creates Sitecore Solr indexes with SIM. Three's a lot of testing that goes into that.

Disposing of a DLL

So I've been working on a feature for Sitecore Instance Manager to automate installing Sitecore instances with Solr turned on.  This has been pulled in to the Develop branch of SIM and should hopefully hit the downloadable version soon.

Switching Solr from port 8983

The canonical port for Solr is 8983, but there are circumstances where you may want to change this. For example, if you wish to experiment with a new release, or you want your various Sitecore development instances to hit separate instances of Solr.  Here are three options for changing the port number.

Solr Cores and Custom Indexes

My adventures with Solr continue!  I was working recently on a feature that required sorting results by the value of a field of a linked item.

Solr Core Discovery

I did a walk-through post awhile back on setting up Solr as a Sitecore 7 index provider.  One of the steps involved defining a "core" (also refered to as a "collection") to hold the indexes.  The way I described is no longer required, as of Solr 4.4, and will no longer work with Solr 5.  (Solr is currently on release 4.6.1).

Setting up Solr with Sitecore 7

This is a brief walk through for people who have heard the buzz (can you say "scales to billions of documents"?) about Solr and Sitecore 7 and want to get it working on their desktop.  This is based on the instructions in Sitecore's Search Scaling Guide, with a few details about the initial Solr install filled in.