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Apache Solr for Laravel Scout

If you’re a Laravel developer, you’ve probably heard of Laravel Scout – a package that makes it easy to add full-text search to your Laravel applications. In this post, I’ll share my experience with Apache Solr and explain why I created the klaasie/scout-solr-engine package, which offers a Laravel Scout implementation for Solr.

My Experience with Apache Solr

Before I dive into the package, let me tell you a bit about my experience with Apache Solr. I work on enterprise-level applications, and Solr is a popular choice in that space. I started using Solr a few years ago and was blown away by its power and versatility.

Solr is based on Apache Lucene, a powerful search library that’s widely used in the industry. Solr provides a ton of features out of the box, including faceted search, spatial search, and more. And it’s designed to scale horizontally, so you can add more nodes to your cluster as your data grows and your search traffic increases.

Setting up Solr can be a bit of a challenge, especially if you’re not familiar with it. But once you get it up and running, it’s a joy to work with. The Solr API is well-documented and easy to use, and the community is active and helpful.

Creating klaasie/scout-solr-engine

As I mentioned earlier, I work with Laravel, and I wanted to use Solr with it. However, I couldn’t find a Laravel Scout implementation for Solr that was up to date and met my needs. So, I decided to create one myself – and thus, the klaasie/scout-solr-engine package was born.

The package offers an easy-to-use interface for integrating Solr with Laravel Scout. It handles indexing and searching of your models, and provides a fluent API for building advanced search queries. It also supports features like faceted search and highlighting out of the box.

Wrapping Up

Laravel Scout is a fantastic package that makes it easy to add search functionality to your Laravel applications. And with options like Algolia, Elasticsearch, MeiliSearch, TNTSearch, and Solr, you’re sure to find a search engine that meets your needs. For me, Apache Solr has been a great choice, thanks to its powerful features and scalability. And with the klaasie/scout-solr-engine package, integrating Solr with Laravel Scout has never been easier.

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