Installing Acquia Search for Drupal 8 and 9¶

Requirements¶

To use Acquia Search with Solr 7 on your website, you must meet the following requirements:

• Prepare a local, virtual development environment for the project.
• Install the following applications for use with your development environments:
  • Git
  • Composer
  • Drush
• Create an SSH key for your user, and provide access to that key to your Cloud Platform environment.
• Create an index for your website.

Acquia Search Solr installation¶

Step 1: Install the new Acquia Search Drupal modules¶

Use the following procedure to install the Drupal modules to enable the use of Acquia Search with Solr 7:

1. If you’re using the Acquia Connector module, run the following command:

   composer require "drupal/acquia_connector:^3.0"
   

   Enable the Acquia Connector module:

   drush en acquia_connector
   

2. Install the Acquia Search module:

   composer require "drupal/acquia_search:^3.0.0"
   

   Enable the Acquia Search module:

   drush en acquia_search
   

Step 2: Configure Acquia Search¶

Use the following process to configure Acquia Search after you have deployed code to your Cloud Platform application.

1. Sign in to the deployed website.

   Alternately, sign in to your website using SSH and run the following Drush command from your website’s docroot directory:

   drush updatedb
   

Step 3: Connect to Acquia Search¶

After configuring Acquia Search, connect to the Acquia Search service.

1. Ensure that you have created a new Solr 7 index as described in Create a search index for the desired database and environment through the Cloud UI.

2. Sign in to your website with the Acquia Search modules.

3. Navigate to Configuration > Search and Metadata > Search API. The Search API settings page displays.

   Note

   If you have Acquia Connector installed and configured, skip to step 6 below.

4. In a separate browser, sign in to Cloud Platform with the Owner or Administrator role and navigate to the far-left menu.

5. Click Product Keys and copy the credential values from the following fields to configure the connection on the Acquia Search settings page of your deployed website:

   • Acquia Subscription identifier
   • Acquia Connector key
   • Acquia Application UUID

   The credential fields display in the following screenshot:

   

6. The Acquia Search module connects with the index automatically if the Search index was previously created for the Drupal application being configured. If the index is recognized, navigate back to the Acquia Search settings configuration page and click Save configuration. The search index is now connected to your Drupal application. If the Search index isn’t automatically identified, make sure a Solr index exists on your Cloud UI.

7. On the Search API page, click Acquia Search API Solr server. The Acquia Search API Solr server configuration page opens.

   On the Acquia Search Status for this connection callout box, the expected Search index name displays in the following format: ABCD-1234.[env].[your-website-name].

8. If you see an error, confirm that you have created the index for the desired environment and database name. If you can’t add the expected Search index name in the Manage Search Indexes option in the Cloud user interface (for example, for a local site, a site running inside a Cloud IDE or CDE), you can add a code override. See Specify the index override.

Step 4: Configure the index¶

After connecting to the search index, you can configure the index by completing the following steps:

1. In the Operations menu, click Edit, and then select the Acquia Search API Solr server as the Server for the index.

   Note

   From Index Options, be sure that Read only for the Acquia Search Search API Solr index is disabled, or else indexing won’t work.

2. Click Save configuration to save the index. The website redirects you to the Search API page.

3. From the Operations menu, click Enable to enable the index.

Step 5: Index site content¶

To index your site content, complete the following steps:

1. On your website, from the Search API page, click the index name to open the index detail page.
2. Click Queue all items for reindexing. Acquia Search will display a confirmation page that prompts you to confirm the reindexing attempt. Click Confirm and you’d be redirected to the index details page.
3. Scroll to the end of the page, and then click Index now. The Index status displays the number of items indexed out of the total number of items in the index. When reindexing is complete, Acquia Search displays a banner message that indicates the reindexing completed as expected.

You’ve now completed the installation of Acquia Search with Solr 7 for your Drupal website.

Troubleshooting Acquia Search¶

Complete the following troubleshooting steps to help resolve issues with the Acquia Search module:

• Use the Acquia Search module messages on a Search API server or on an index page to understand why the module is failing.
• If the module is trying to connect to localhost or to the IP address 127.0.0.1, the Acquia Search module isn’t configured as expected or can’t detect the appropriate search core based on environment variables.
• Ensure that the Drupal site can properly reach the Acquia Search API service, which provides the list of available Solr indexes for your Application to your Drupal site. To do this, go to the Search API Server you are trying to configure, and then click Edit. If properly connected, a list of available search cores will display in the SOLR CORE(S) CURRENTLY AVAILABLE FOR YOUR APPLICATION box.
• If you are running the Acquia Search module on a non-Acquia environment, you must use acquia_search.settings.override_search_core to point the module to a search core. See the module’s README.txt for details.
• The Acquia Search module has some hidden settings. See README.txt for more details.

Drush commands¶

Acquia Search Solr includes several Drush commands to manage search from the command line.

For more details, see Drupal-acquia_search_solr-Commands-AcquiaSearchSolrCommands.