Recently I did my first conversion from Lucene to SOLR. With Lucene being phased out in Sitecore 9 this will probably be more common. You can find a lot of different installation guides in installing SOLR, but there are a few things that tripped me up that I want to prevent others from having to deal with.

Avoid Pitfalls

Make sure every Lucene config is disabled. Even the ones in the sub folders.

Make sure all the SOLR configs are enabled even the ones in the sub folders.

Make sure you don’t have any Cores with the same name inside the core.properties file. I had Sitecore_Master_Index in more than one file and all my Cores would disappear every time I restarted until I corrected the name.

Custom Indexes Differences

Some of this is obvious as you can replace Lucene with Solr, but some were not so obvious to me and I had to do some research and ask for help. I highlighted the less obvious ones.

From this:

<index

id=“acme_widgetgroups_index” type=“Sitecore.ContentSearch.LuceneProvider.LuceneIndex, Sitecore.ContentSearch.LuceneProvider“>



To this:

<index

id=“acme_widgetgroups_index” type=“Sitecore.ContentSearch.SolrProvider.SolrSearchIndex, Sitecore.ContentSearch.SolrProvider“>



From this:

<configuration

ref=“contentSearch/indexConfigurations/defaultLuceneIndexConfiguration“>



To this:

<configuration

ref=“contentSearch/indexConfigurations/defaultSolrIndexConfiguration“>



From this:

<fieldMap

type=“Sitecore.ContentSearch.FieldMap, Sitecore.ContentSearch“>



To this:

<fieldMap

ref=“contentSearch/indexConfigurations/defaultSolrIndexConfiguration/fieldMap“>



From this:

<field fieldName=“widgetfilters” storageType=“YES” indexType=“TOKENIZED” vectorType=“NO” boost=“1f” type=“System.String” settingType=“Sitecore.ContentSearch.LuceneProvider.LuceneSearchFieldConfiguration, Sitecore.ContentSearch.LuceneProvider“ />



To this:

<field fieldName=“widgetfilters” returnType=“string“ />



From this:

<documentOptions

type=“Sitecore.ContentSearch.LuceneProvider.LuceneDocumentBuilderOptions, Sitecore.ContentSearch.LuceneProvider“>



To this:

<documentOptions

type=“Sitecore.ContentSearch.SolrProvider.SolrDocumentBuilderOptions, Sitecore.ContentSearch.SolrProvider“>



I hope this helps you as you do your conversion. If you have any questions, feel free to ask.