Adding Global Search to your Moodle #mootieuk17
- 1. Adding global search to your Moodle Dan Poltawski Integrator, Moodle HQ @dan_p #mootieuk17
- 2. Copyright 2017 © Moodle Pty Ltd - CC SA - support@moodle.com Global Search - Available in Moodle 3.1 and later - Search across Moodle content - Moodle handles access control - Search is handled by a ‘search engine’ plugin - Moodle core comes with support for Apache Solr
- 3. Copyright 2017 © Moodle Pty Ltd - CC SA - support@moodle.com Considerations - Content - Core plugins have good search coverage - Third party plugins need to add support for Search API - Setup - Apache Solr is a non-trivial dependency - Requires system administration work - Future plugin planned to support smaller sites (MDL-53226)
- 4. Copyright 2017 © Moodle Pty Ltd - CC SA - support@moodle.com Why Solr? - Enterprise search server from Apache Foundation - Open source - Fast, scalable - Indexes rich files including Microsoft Office, PDF etc - Natural language & advanced querying operations (AND, OR, * )
- 5. Copyright 2017 © Moodle Pty Ltd - CC SA - support@moodle.com Setup Steps 1. Enable Solr PHP extension 2. Setup Solr Server 3. Configure Solr connection 4. Create Solr schema 5. Initial Index of Moodle content
- 6. Copyright 2017 © Moodle Pty Ltd - CC SA - support@moodle.com 1.Enable Solr PHP Extension - Solr PHP needs to be installed on Moodle web server - Install the PECL extension - https://pecl.php.net/package/solr - Don’t forget to restart web server https://docs.moodle.org/32/en/Global_search#How_to_install_Solr
- 7. Copyright 2017 © Moodle Pty Ltd - CC SA - support@moodle.com 2. Setup Solr Server - Moodle requires Solr version 4 - Solr 5.x or 6.x is highly recommended - Solr requires Java 8 (or OpenJDK 1.8) - Package manager (apt/yum) installation of Solr is fine
- 8. Copyright 2017 © Moodle Pty Ltd - CC SA - support@moodle.com 2. Setup Solr Server - Consider security - Protect like database server - Solr is RAM hungry - Uni-size deployments reported to use 10-20GB - Disable file indexing to reduce requirements - Clustering solutions available - Possible for multiple Moodle sites to shared a single Solr install
- 9. Copyright 2017 © Moodle Pty Ltd - CC SA - support@moodle.com 3. Configure Solr Server - Configured in: Site administration > Plugins > Search > Solr - Options for http authentication and SSL certificates
- 10. Copyright 2017 © Moodle Pty Ltd - CC SA - support@moodle.com 4. Create Solr Schema - Solr 5 and above - Automatic - Visit manage page - Solr 4 - Requires manual setup - https://docs.moodle.org/32/en/ Global_search#Solr_4_schema_setup
- 11. Copyright 2017 © Moodle Pty Ltd - CC SA - support@moodle.com 5. Initial Index - Can take a significant amount of time on large sites - Up to 12 hours on large sites - Recommended approach: - Leave global search disabled - Run indexer script from command line: php search/cli/indexer.php --force - Enable global search
- 12. Copyright 2017 © Moodle Pty Ltd - CC SA - support@moodle.com Setup Complete - Enable global search - Search bar in site header - Advanced search form - New content will be indexed periodically by scheduled task
- 13. Copyright 2017 © Moodle Pty Ltd - CC SA - support@moodle.com Search Areas - All plugins enabled by default - Can be changed at any time - May wish to disable some for institutional reasons
- 14. Copyright 2017 © Moodle Pty Ltd - CC SA - support@moodle.com Search Areas & Hit Ratio - Some search areas may provide results which few users can see - Can be costly to such search areas enabled - Future improvement planned to expose these search areas automatically: - https://tracker.moodle.org/browse/MDL-55063
- 15. Copyright 2017 © Moodle Pty Ltd - CC SA - support@moodle.com Questions?