Ruby on Rails - Setting up a Solr server with Sunspot for production

rubyonrails-talk
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I've recently purchased a linux server VPS and have managed to get my rails 3.1 application online and running using apache and passenger. It runs itself whenever the apache server starts and although I'm not sure totally why or how this works - it works. My rails application uses Sunspot for searching through it's contents - however this has caused an issue, as it isn't as simple as running "rake sunspot:solr:start RAILS_ENV=production" when in production.

It seems to be pretty poorly documented how to setup a Solr server and get it working with a rails application - however I've had a go. I followed the instructions here to setup a Tomcat/Solr server: https://github.com/outoftime/sunspot/wiki/Configure-Solr-on-Ubuntu,-the-quickest-way However I'm not quite sure what I'm supposed to do with it.. going to : 8080/solr and :8983:/solr give me weird admin panels which I don't seem to be able to do anything interesting with, but I'm sure that these URLs are important.

When running my rails app - I get the following error on pages with the search integrated:

Connection refused - connect(2)

Which I think indicates that it can't access the server properly or something. I've been googling and trying things for hours - but to no avail. Could anyone help me get this working?

Please Help,

Thanks In Advance,

Joe

2

No kidding :slight_smile:

What does your config/sunspot.yml look like? Assuming solr/tomcat is really running and you're accessing those URLs in a browser, it sounds like your app is trying to connect to the wrong port.

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config/sunspot.yml: production:   solr:     hostname: localhost     port: 8983     path: '/solr/'     log_level: WARNING

development:   solr:     hostname: localhost     port: 8982     log_level: INFO

test:   solr:     hostname: localhost     port: 8981     log_level: WARNING

4

OK, can you connect manually from a shell on the machine? To make sure there's no firewall/iptables whatever issues.

5

Connect manually to what? When running "curl localhost:8983/solr/" it returns the page with the "Solr Admin" link on if that's what you mean.

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I think (based on some quick testing against Sunspot's default Solr instance) that the trailing / here is blowing things up. The underlying code takes the given path and adds things like '/select' to it, which creates double slashes in the URL. For instance, this request succeeds (in development mode, so port 8982):

GET http://localhost:8982/solr/select?q=*:*

but this returns a 404:

GET http://localhost:8982/solr//select?q=*:*

Not sure how this is turning into a connect failure, but it's worth checking out...

--Matt Jones

7

Removing the trailing slash on '/solr/' and restarting the apache2 server unfortunately still results in the connection issue. Going to http://localhost:8983/solr/select?q=*:* results in an XML file as shown:

<response> <lst name="responseHeader"> <int name="status">0</int> <int name="QTime">164</int> <lst name="params"> <str name="q">*:*</str> </lst> </lst> <result name="response" numFound="0" start="0"/> </response>

And when trying to run the reindex command: rake sunspot:solr:reindex RAILS_ENV=production I get the following error from the terminal:

rake aborted! Solr Response: Internal Server Error

Thanks for all of your fast replies - hopefully I get can this issue sorted sometime soon! Any further help would be much appreciated!

8

After talking more with Hassan and long sessions of Troubleshooting - I managed to fix the issue. I firstly deleted the sunspot.yml file in the config folder of my rails application and replaced it with an initializer (sunspot.rb) in my config/initalizers directory which specified the sunspot path:

Sunspot.config.solr.url = 'http://localhost:8983/solr’

After doing this I stopped getting the errors while in development, although a reindex was required. When trying to reindex I then encountered the error: "Solr Response: Internal Server Error" At this stage I tried a variety of things to get it working - some/all of these may or may not have had a bearing on the getting it to work. I changed the file permissions (chmod, chown) of the files in my rails application to make sure they were all fully accessible and writable to by apache and solr, changed Java versions from OpenJDK to Oracle/ Sun JDK (sudo update-alternatives --config java) - I think this was the main fix to this problem, closed down another server that was running on the same port (plus closed down tomcat since it turns out it wasn't being used). After this - everything reindexed fine and it worked a treat! Closing the other server that was running on the same port also fixed an issue in which I got the "Connection refused - connect(2) " when running is production mode despite it working in development.

Hope this helps other people that may be experiencing the same or similar problems!