Build a fully-featured and scalable search application using PHP to unlock the search functions provided by Solr

Overview

• Understand the tools that can be used to communicate between PHP and Solr, and how they work internally
• Explore the essential search functions of Solr such as sorting, boosting, faceting, and highlighting using your PHP code
• Take a look at some advanced features of Solr such as spell checking, grouping, and auto complete with implementations using PHP code

In Detail

The Search tool is a very powerful for any website. No matter what type of website, the search tool helps visitors find what they are looking for using key words and narrow down the results using facets. Solr is the popular, blazing fast, open source enterprise search platform from the Apache Lucene project. It is highly scalable, providing distributed search and index replication, and it powers the search and navigation features of many of the world's largest websites.

This book is a practical, hands-on, end-to-end guide that provides you with all the tools required to build a fully-featured search application using Apache Solr and PHP. The book contains practical examples and step-by-step instructions.

Starting off with the basics of installing Apache Solr and integrating it with Php, the book then proceeds to explore the features provided by Solr to improve searches using Php. You will learn how to build and maintain a Solr index using Php, discover the query modes available with Solr, and how to use them to tune the Solr queries to retrieve relevant results. You will look at how to build and use facets in your search, how to tune and use fast result highlighting, and how to build a spell check and auto complete feature using Solr. You will finish by learning some of the advanced concepts required to runa large-scale enterprise level search infrastructure.

What you will learn from this book

• Install Solr and integrate it with PHP
• Insert, update, and delete documents from the Solr index using PHP
• Perform select queries using the dismax and edismax query modes
• Sort, boost, and re-use select queries using PHP
• Employ faceting and result highlighting
• Debug and fine-tune Solr search queries for relevance
• Implement the spell checker and auto complete features using Solr and PHP
• Search for documents similar to a particular document and Retrieve index stats using PHP
• Deploy distributed searching using sharing and load-balancing of Solr queries

Approach

This book is full of step-by-step example-oriented tutorials which will show readers how to integrate Solr in PHP applications using the available libraries, and boost the inherent search facilities that Solr offers.

Who this book is written for

If you are a developer who knows PHP and is interested in integrating search into your applications, this is the book for you. No advanced knowledge of Solr is required. Very basic knowledge of system commands and the command-line interface on both Linux and Windows is required. You should also be familiar with the concept of Web servers.