Drupal using Solr externally on another machine?

Question

I'd like to use the Drupal solr search module with the Apache Solr Search hosted on an external machine. I know that Acquia offer this as a service. But it's not an affordable option for me. I'd like to install Solr on an inexpensive VPS and have all my various Drupal sites which are on different hosts accessing the search functions. Am I barking up the wrong tree?

Answer 1

Sure, you can do that. But keep these things in mind:

• Security: if your Solr instance is not in the same local network as your Drupal sites, you'll have to carefully set up security in your Solr's Tomcat/Jetty. Having a publicly accessible Solr instance could be a major security problem.
• Latency: another issue with a remote Solr server is latency. It's not cool if your carefully optimized website takes 2s to return the search results.
• Bandwidth between Solr and the Drupal website could also be a problem but I guess latency is a bigger issue.

Answer 2

The issues that Mauricio brings up are valid, however I'm certain that it's possible to set up a solr server on a separate server without problems for 2 reasons. 1. we are currently using such a setup. 2. acquia.com offers solr as a service (which might be a good solution for you if you don't want to deal with running or setting up your own solr server).

We are currently using a seperate solr server, and because it is in the same local network as the webserver (both on Rackspace cloud) there are no latency issues.

Security is a concern and should not be taken lightly since solr is has very little built in. The easiest type of security to setup is limiting access to the solr server to only the webserver. There are however more flexible security solutions, but they will probably take some more setting up.