Some colleagues of mine have a large Java web app that uses a search system built with Lucene Java. What I’d like to do is have a nice HTTP-based API to access those existing search indexes. I’ve used Nutch before and really liked how simple the OpenSearch implementation made it to grab results as RSS.
I’ve tried setting Solr’s dataDir in solrconfig.xml, hoping it would happily pick up the existing index files, but it seems to just ignore them.
My main question is:
Can Solr be used to access Lucene indexes created elsewhere? Or might there be a better solution?
I have never tried this, but you would have to adjust the schema.xml to include all the fields of the documents that are in your Lucene index, because Solr won’t allow you to search for a field if it is not defined in schema.xml.
The adjustment to schema.xml should also include defining the query-time analyzers to properly search in your field, especially if the field where indexed using custom analyzers.
In solrconfig.xml you may have to change settings in the indexDefaults and the mainIndex sections.
But I’d be happy to read answers from people who actually did it.