Chapter 1. Installing and Integrating Solr and PHP

Are you a PHP programmer? Do you feel the need to incorporate search in your applications? Are you aware of Apache Solr? Do you feel it is a very tedious job to integrate Solr into your PHP applications? This book will make the integration easy for you. We will be looking at an end-to-end integration of Apache Solr with PHP. We will start with Solr installation. We will look at how Solr can be integrated with PHP. We will then explore the features provided by Solr through PHP code. After going through the book, you should be able to integrate almost all features provided by Solr into your PHP applications.

This chapter will help us in installing Apache Solr in two major environments: Windows and Linux. We will also go ahead and explore installation of Solr as part of Apache Tomcat Server. We will discuss the options available for talking to Solr via PHP and also learn how to set up the Solarium library for Solr PHP integration.

We will be covering the following topics in this chapter:

• What is Solr?

• Downloading and installing Solr on Windows and Linux

• Configuring Tomcat to run Solr.

• Executing ping queries on Solr using PHP

• Discussing different libraries for Solr PHP integration

• Installing Solarium on Windows and Linux

• Connecting PHP to Solr using Solarium

• Running ping queries using PHP and Solarium

• Checking Solr logs