Jeremy Davis
Sitecore, C# and web development
I hit an interesting issue recently: Some code that worked fine on a QA instance of Sitecore had been deployed for UAT and was now failing with an odd error message. Whilst this issue was entirely our fault, there wasn't much in Google about the error messages I was seeing, so I'm trying to correct that problem today...
Recently Steve McGill asked me if I'd tried using SIF's certificate creation when automating Solr setup for Sitecore. I realised I'd not put any effort into how this might work – and that seemed like an excellent excuse for some research...
Recently I was writing about the changes to Java licensing that Oracle are enforcing in 2019. It's not an uncommon reaction to the challenges that the new license introduces to start thinking about alternatives to how you might manage search for your Sitecore deployments. So what can you do?
It's Christmas, and I'm dreaming of a festive sherry, while I slog through my last working day of the year. So hopefully you can forgive me the flagrant clickbait headline... 😉
But you'd have to have your head in the sand not to have noticed that Oracle are changing the licensing terms for their builds of the Java runtime. They've decided that they want people and businesses to pay for the fastest access to support updates for Java. But as Sitecore developers, many of us make use of Solr – which relies on Java. So what can we do?
As time goes on, something I've noticed is that as Sitecore evolves it is taking a greater reliance on search integration – making things like Solr ever more important. And that leads to an exciting new set of issues you come across if, for some reason, your search service is not available.
I wasted some perfectly good development time recently when some of my renderings vanished from published pages, thanks to this.
My first time having to configure Solr for Sitecore recently taught me a variety of new things. (I know – how have I managed to avoid it this long?) Most of the basics of the setup have been well documented elsewhere, so I won't repeat any of that. However setting up the site to use the Ninject DI container wasn't as smooth as the documentation suggested, so here are some notes on the issues I hit in case you find yourself stuck:
Last time out I was looking at scripting installs of Solr using plain old PowerShell. Since the Sitecore world is getting to grips with a new PowerShell based install approach with the Sitecore Install Framework (SIF), it seemed like a sensible idea to try porting my ideas to SIF so see how that would work...
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...
