Jeremy Davis
Sitecore, C# and web development
I'm sure I've said before that any task you have to do more than once is worth automating. Well recently I've found myself needing to install Solr in a variety of places – so obviously my mind turned to automation. There are lots of ways this can be approached, and some people have already had a go at it for their own needs, but here's my take.
I've spent the last week or so working on the config changes necessary to migrate a client site running Sitecore v8.1 from using Lucene to Solr for its search infrastructure. I've not worked much with Solr before, so this has been a good opportunity for me to learn about how it works and how it gets configured. But when I deployed my changes from my local development environment to a central testing server I discovered some odd behavior which Google didn't help with. So, for the good of search indexes everywhere, here's what happened...
I got the chance to speak at the Manchester Sitecore user group recently, introducing some tools and tricks that can be used to measure site performance while you're developing your Sitecore code. For anyone who wasn't there (and those who were but, want to refer back to what I said) here's a summary of the important bits of content from that talk...
