rOpenSci: The solrium package

A general purpose R interface to Solr

Development is now following Solr v7 and greater - which introduced many changes, which means many functions here may not work with your Solr installation older than v7.

Be aware that currently some functions will only work in certain Solr modes, e.g, collection_create() won’t work when you are not in Solrcloud mode. But, you should get an error message stating that you aren’t.

Currently developing against Solr v8.2.0

Package API and ways of using the package

The first thing to look at is SolrClient to instantiate a client connection to your Solr instance. ping and schema are helpful functions to look at after instantiating your client.

There are two ways to use solrium:

  1. Call functions on the SolrClient object
  2. Pass the SolrClient object to functions

For example, if we instantiate a client like conn <- SolrClient$new(), then to use the first way we can do conn$search(...), and the second way by doing solr_search(conn, ...). These two ways of using the package hopefully make the package more user friendly for more people, those that prefer a more object oriented approach, and those that prefer more of a functional approach.

Collections

Functions that start with collection work with Solr collections when in cloud mode. Note that these functions won’t work when in Solr standard mode

Cores

Functions that start with core work with Solr cores when in standard Solr mode. Note that these functions won’t work when in Solr cloud mode

Documents

The following functions work with documents in Solr

#>  - add
#>  - delete_by_id
#>  - delete_by_query
#>  - update_atomic_json
#>  - update_atomic_xml
#>  - update_csv
#>  - update_json
#>  - update_xml

Search

Search functions, including solr_parse for parsing results from different functions appropriately

#>  - solr_all
#>  - solr_facet
#>  - solr_get
#>  - solr_group
#>  - solr_highlight
#>  - solr_mlt
#>  - solr_parse
#>  - solr_search
#>  - solr_stats

Install

Stable version from CRAN

install.packages("solrium")

Or development version from GitHub

devtools::install_github("ropensci/solrium")
library("solrium")

Setup

Use SolrClient$new() to initialize your connection. These examples use a remote Solr server, but work on any local Solr server.

(cli <- SolrClient$new(host = "api.plos.org", path = "search", port = NULL))
#> <Solr Client>
#>   host: api.plos.org
#>   path: search
#>   port: 
#>   scheme: http
#>   errors: simple
#>   proxy:

You can also set whether you want simple or detailed error messages (via errors), and whether you want URLs used in each function call or not (via verbose), and your proxy settings (via proxy) if needed. For example:

SolrClient$new(errors = "complete")

Your settings are printed in the print method for the connection object

cli
#> <Solr Client>
#>   host: api.plos.org
#>   path: search
#>   port: 
#>   scheme: http
#>   errors: simple
#>   proxy:

For local Solr server setup:

bin/solr start -e cloud -noprompt
bin/post -c gettingstarted example/exampledocs/*.xml

Solr server management

This isn’t as complete as searching functions show above, but we’re getting there.

Cores

conn <- SolrClient$new()

Many functions, e.g.:

Create a core

conn$core_create(name = "foo_bar")

Collections

Many functions, e.g.:

Create a collection

conn$collection_create(name = "hello_world")

Add documents

Add documents, supports adding from files (json, xml, or csv format), and from R objects (including data.frame and list types so far)

df <- data.frame(id = c(67, 68), price = c(1000, 500000000))
conn$add(df, name = "books")

Delete documents, by id

conn$delete_by_id(name = "books", ids = c(3, 4))

Or by query

conn$delete_by_query(name = "books", query = "manu:bank")

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