 Welcome everybody. I thought I'd use a little snap camera for the occasion since it's a Mike Tyson's punch-out theme kind of thing going on this talk is how to win a fight with solar and Came up with this as I was fighting with solar and then I realized this title Probably should be Different it probably should be how to fight win a fight against solar because some of the configuration problems that we're having This whole talk came from me trying to migrate Solar from one service one server We were migrating the site over and then all of a sudden their search start stopped working because of solar So what things we're going to be talking about a little bit about me my favorite subject? We're gonna talk about what is solar really briefly on that I think a lot of people know what it is by now talk a little bit about how to configure Drupal and solar how to really configure Drupal and solar and then some of the solar configurations that actually You have a problem with that tend to be a problem for that so There's a I'm on poles not Chad. I said I was gonna listen to anyway, so a little That's why because I keep going to advance the slides and it's I'm in the wrong window There you go a little bit about me Marcus. He has some technical lead at canopy studios. I Just literally got my canopy t-shirt yesterday, so I'm pretty excited about that do a lot of back-end development stuff with a react and node and of course Drupal and in view These days need to get a hold of me. I am Markey on the Drupal Slack or a team poop on The Twitters or a muscle drunken Drupal on the Twitters as well So if you ever need anything there or you see me getting in an argument with myself, you know, why anyway? I'm also in a band here in Albuquerque called Darling and in theory We have a Facebook live going on Sunday evening We're trying to figure out if our guitarist is gonna be back from camping in order to do that So if you want some good music or want to follow a band Feel free a little self-promotion is always fun. All right Another thing I want to say thank you canopy for allowing me to do this I mean, I'm just started with them and they're already letting me Take most of the week off for bad camp And we are definitely hiring. We're hiring for a tech lead Which is my position as well not for my position, but to work with me. We're also looking for full-stack developers contract Drupal developers Project managers wordpress developers if you want to come work for a really really nice company I highly recommend coming in working with my our friends at Canopy and I'm really distracted by how high Tommy jumps the guy in the upper right hand corner or upper left hand corner How high he is jumping right there? It's it's very interesting. So All right. So first round one against glass Joe What is solar solar is a a search indexing server? It is actually built in Java by the Apache a lucerne project So it is a Java server itself instead of having a database where it's querying the database over and over again It's actually using an index to figure out the best results for your search Information and this search it takes a big load off of the database if you search why solar over Drupal search Though there's just a ton of studies on there on how it will help take the load off your site for search Because if you're querying the database to search each field and we all know that Drupal has a ton of different tables For each field it doesn't really do a good like search To it so you can't really things have to be very exact solar takes care of that by indexing it on a On a separate way So do recommend using it when you can there are other options. There's also elastic search And then there's a third one that I didn't write down that I can't remember what it is right now So the great thing about Solars is it's standard space like it says there in the little promo of if you go to a patchy solar comm I think that's what that is and It's standard space so it's you can get the results through XML through JSON Just with straight HTTP requests And then that way you can pull your stuff not only in Drupal But in other projects as well if you have a Gatsby search you can do so search and solar if you have You know wordpress wordpress works well with solar as well all sorts of different things Work with that This round was very short Because it's a glass Joe both also again. We all pretty much a lot of people understand what solar is and what what is purpose for So why are we doing talking about this because we've got solar inside of Drupal itself? and There is a thing called in Drupal called the Search API and what it is it allows Drupal to use other services other it's been recognized that you know The the core database search Can be cumbersome on large sites very enterprise size size sites If so a bunch of people are searching at the same time, it'll really drag your site down So we have the solar we have the search API And then we have a module called search API solar which actually Interacts between the search API and then the solar servers and I've got this big cumbersome Graph here because it talks about the different versions of solar that are out there Solar six and below are suns heading at the end of the year in December So I did want to kind of highlight that you want to be working mostly with solar seven if not eight Or solar cloud We all you know PHP 7 2 is pretty much a requirement in Drupal Lower versions are supported, but you really want to use that And that's what the the module is pointing out you can use the legacy sub modules to continue to work with the solar for and below but as of 20 December in 2020, I don't know the exact date It's going to be shutting down the support For solar so if things go awry, you're really not going to be having a good time With that but solar seven is great and solar seven is usually available on most of the services out there I'll be talking here in a little bit about the differences of the platforms that are out there that have it So yeah, what you're gonna want to do is you're gonna want to actually install the search API module in Drupal along with this search API solar Module in Drupal and there are a couple other helper modules that are out there for you But I will be discussing those in a little bit Local platforms all support it land of doxel D dev, which I just put DD instead of D dev But anyway D devs out there out there as well they all Support various versions of solar as well So you can actually if your site does have solar for I do know that doxel does support it But again, not really something that you want to be using you kind of want to get these things up upgrading as well and I know that Lando starts out at Solar seven and I believe so does D dev but then you can actually switch to the different flavors rather easily in your local development to match your your production environment and ultimately be able to Have your local look exact and feel exactly like as if it's on a server away which makes development way way easier and I thought I had changed present presentation title somewhere else, but apparently I did not so anyway Hosting platforms are interesting because some of them are fully extensible and some of them still have older versions In aquia it uses solar for five and it's trying to ramp itself up So you definitely want to use the search API solar eight dot X and that's actually what the other thing I want to point out here There's the Drupal compatibility as of eight dot eight. We can actually use this four dot X Or the the minor revision of the Drupal module Such as four dot X and that's what you're going to be using for Drupal eight Drupal nine And that's only going to support solar seven and above So you're going to want to be using that with the newer versions if you need support for the lower versions It is recommended that you use the eight dot X dash one dot X And the versions to eight dot X dash two and eight dot X dot three are right out So anyway, you're going to want to use that contributed module Pantheon actually uses a Solar version three dot six. However, they have a very specific Module for use with the Pantheon system and I do enjoy me some Pantheon And I do like the way that their solar works and what was very interesting is the entire time I've been trying to set up Drupal eight configurations with Pantheon I had no idea this module existed and once I found this module it just made the interaction between solar and Drupal way way easier and for most Most levels on Pantheon do have solar available to them Out of the box and then platform SH is great because you can pretty much define Anything you want with them Their versions of solar they go from 410 all the way up to the latest version eight dot six Now some of them if you want the older version You have to have a higher tier support level which is interesting to me because that seems backwards But hey You can get it if you need it and it's all configured inside your platform config file and I'll be showing more about platform a little bit more because the whole Reason I brought up this talk was to Because I was running into an issue in platform and then they helped me solve it. So anyway So yeah, you're gonna with platform if you're again using seven dot X or above You're gonna want to be using the search API solar module four dot X and above So there's that External platforms, so you don't even have to have it hosted on your Your own service you can actually use external things aqueous search It can be used as just a search platform for you a node factor or You can actually host it with Apache themselves and then you can use that information It will index your site for you and then store that off somewhere else and then serve that back to you off somewhere from somewhere else Well, which is really nice because again, you're taking the weight off of your your website and you're gonna be able to search easily without your site being bogged down. So those are other options that you have out there and Yeah, actually in the bottom right hand corner I do have a link to the contributed module search API solar because frankly that is a screen cap of For a section of that as well. So those are your options for solar and Drupal One thing though You want to be careful of indexing external Your development environments in your production search So this actually I ran into this a while back ago I was happily working on search on my local and had a silly nodes Names and silly node titles and pictures of cats or my dog and Then all of a sudden that was being searched and indexed in in the production because I was using the same Production environment so short story very long or short story about the right size is that you want to make sure that you are searching and indexing the right environments without Crossing crossing streams would be the best way of there So something to think about while you're out there. Alright round three Drupal solar configuration And this is a was part of the reason that I that I ran into this issue is Because there is the Drupal UI where you can actually just This is the actual setup for a Drupal a solar server in the solar Module or the search API solar module and you pick out your protocol You've named the solar host, you know in this instance You know, I changed the name of the solar host because to protect the innocent I guess you could say your ports can change from 8080 to 86 30 or 83 63 or something like that And then what your core is depends on on that as well and I'll get more into Configuring that kind of stuff later on in life So this is actually where you want to set that stuff up to make sure that the server and Drupal are talking to each other And then you set up an index to kind of To chat between the two of them, but sometimes You like I was saying before you have a problem with the server being live and Then indexing something else So what you can do is actually you can take that Config and just stick whatever in here Like this one actually says config found in settings dot php because we're gonna be actually changing that depending on the settings dot php Of what you're gonna do Of course, there is no host called config found in settings that php and if there is I'm kind of sad I don't know about it But you have that ability to get to get that information and then what you do is you go into your settings And this is actually the platform which is backwards because I the slides out of order but what platform does is it actually has a Relationship where all that information for that your your server is stored Remotely and you don't have to have to put those credentials or anything else into a Into your repository And it just basically takes it and takes your config Your config for your connector of the machine name of it and the machine name can be whatever you want to call your server and And it will work for you and then automatically connect to that instance as opposed to connecting to Whatever is live or whatnot and pantheon does the same thing with the pantheon the settings that pantheon that php Acquia does some other stuff with their Acquia search module So that's ways that you can get around to make sure that your Configurings it based on there and this is the actually the slide I thought we were looking at and this is actually taking in your settings dot local dot php or even your settings that php since there's really no Sensitive information in there You can say that a Everybody instantly if I'm local I want to connect to the solar host, which is what does the host is called Indoxel using that path and then whatever the core is because the core again Once again will change depending on how you install and then the port is all set up and that will override Whatever is in your config? Export or whatever is in your your your settings on in the database as well Yeah, so I use the same slide place. So that's unnecessary. So that's the difference in the same in setting up solar I've got three minutes. So wow, I figured that would be done quicker than this So no questions yet. So we're gonna move on to round four, which is solar configuration So and this is actually where I was gonna go with this talk at the beginning I was gonna actually look in these files and help people understand what they're all they are It's full of files and if you mess with them incorrectly Everything will break and then you're gonna cry here be dragons is what I'm trying to say This is stuff that the the server itself sets up for you and will read and write into Let it do that. Don't try to mess with that directly Because you can actually get that config after you set up your solar You can actually there's a nice shiny button says to get the config zip and it will pull that stuff down So say you have a server somewhere else and you're trying to replicate that on your local You can actually get that same config and pull it on to your local local file So yeah, there there's all that information and This is actually how you set up something in doxel to create it Where you can actually have doxel say, okay, I want to use this custom config On there and if you go to the doxel site, it'll let you know what's going on there But your mileage may vary because depending on the version of solar that you install the var live solar comf in Seven is actually in the the ops folder, which is a different folder structure altogether So I think just install solar and let it do it There's also a thing called the Apache solar defaults module, which is part of the search of excuse me API solar defaults module But the problem with that is it takes a very heavy liberty or Expects there to be an article with a body and a comment and a field tags in a field image and a page with a body so if your page Doesn't do it or if you don't have that you can actually patch it to change it around However, that's kind of a pain. So again, just install export the configuration and Everything will be working on there as well. So you can have your config. It'll be exactly what you needed to be And that's it for me. I did not see any questions. I am right at time. Was there anything at all? No, no not seeing anything Just some housekeeping that that Amy June doesn't want me to do but I'm gonna do it really quickly after we're done here And actually it's a little bit while I'm rushing we're gonna go see Donna with accessible marketing practices and Donna is who I will refer to as my handler because she's actually the one that pretty My slides to include the images on here and then after that we have the happy hour and then a board night as well I believe the board game night is gonna be on a discord and then the happy hour is gonna be on a zoom So as always Check the bad camp website for more details And if you have any questions, please feel free to reach out to me You can reach me again at slack or email me marky at can be studios Com and I'm gonna say that's time. Thank you very much for attending and I hope I helped Take care