Solr Full Text Search Indexing
==============================

Solr [http://lucene.apache.org/solr/] is a Lucene indexing server. Dovecot
communicates to it using HTTP/XML queries.

Compiling
---------

Give '--with-solr' parameter to 'configure' script. You'll also need to have
libexpat and libcurl installed (if packages do not exist dovecot will compile
without solr support). YUM: expat-devel, curl-devel

Configuration
-------------

Solr Schema
-----------

Replace Solr's existing 'solr/conf/schema.xml' using 'doc/solr-schema.xml' from
Dovecot.

If you only have a 'managed-schema' file: copy 'schema.xml' to that folder,
delete 'managed-schema' file and remove or comment out (be aware not to have
recursive comment) the block '<updateRequestProcessorChain
name="add-unknown-fields-to-the-schema">' from 'solrconfig.xml'. Then restart
Solr. The 'managed-schema' file will be rebuild from 'schema.xml'. (See 1
[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/37989084/solr-6-1-where-is-my-collections-managed-schema-file],
2
[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/30673095/using-schema-xml-instead-of-managed-schema-with-solr-5-1-x])

You may want to check if the file contains something you want to modify. See
Solr wiki [http://wiki.apache.org/solr/SchemaXml] for how to configure it.

Dovecot Plugin
--------------

On Dovecot's side add:

Into 10-mail.conf (note add existing plugins to string)

---%<-------------------------------------------------------------------------
mail_plugins = $mail_plugins fts fts_solr
---%<-------------------------------------------------------------------------

Into 90-plugins.conf

---%<-------------------------------------------------------------------------
plugin {
  fts = solr
  fts_solr = url=http://solr.example.org:8983/solr/
}
---%<-------------------------------------------------------------------------

Fields listed in 'fts_solr' plugin setting are space separated. They can
contain:

 * url=<solr url> : Required base URL for Solr.
 * debug : Enable HTTP debugging. Writes to error log.
 * break-imap-search : Use Solr also for indexing TEXT and BODY searches. This
   makes your server non-IMAP-compliant. (This is always enabled in v2.1+)

Important notes:

 * Some mail clients will not submit any search requests for certain fields if
   they index things locally eg. Thunderbird will not send any requests for
   fields such as sender/recipients/subject when Body is not included as this
   data is contained within the local index.

Solr commits & optimization
---------------------------

Solr indexes should be optimized once in a while to make searches faster and to
remove space used by deleted mails. Dovecot never asks Solr to optimize, so you
should do this yourself. Perhaps a cronjob that sends the optimize-command to
Solr every n hours.

With v2.2.3+ Dovecot only does soft commits to the Solr index to improve
performance. You must run a hard commit once in a while or Solr will keep
increasing its transaction log sizes. For example send the commit command to
Solr every few minutes.

---%<-------------------------------------------------------------------------
# Optimize should be run somewhat rarely, e.g. once a day
curl http://<hostname/ip>:<port|default 8983>/solr/update?optimize=true
# Commit should be run pretty often, e.g. every minute
curl http://<hostname/ip>:<port|default 8983>/solr/update?commit=true
---%<-------------------------------------------------------------------------

Re-index mailbox
----------------

If you require to force dovecot to reindex a whole mailbox you can run the
command shown, this will only take action when a search is done and will apply
to the whole mailbox.

---%<-------------------------------------------------------------------------
doveadm fts rescan -u <username>
---%<-------------------------------------------------------------------------

If you want to index a single mailbox/all mailboxes you can run the command
shown, this will happen immediately and will blocking until action is
completed.

---%<-------------------------------------------------------------------------
doveadm index [-u <user>|-A] [-S <socket_path>] [-q] [-n <max recent>] <mailbox
mask>
---%<-------------------------------------------------------------------------

Sorting by relevancy
--------------------

Solr/Lucene supports returning a relevancy score for search results. If you
want to sort the search results by the score, use Dovecot's non-standard
X-SCORE sort key:

---%<-------------------------------------------------------------------------
1 SORT (X-SCORE) UTF-8 <search parameters>
---%<-------------------------------------------------------------------------

Indexes
-------

Dovecot creates the following fields:

 * id: Unique ID consisting of uid/uidv/user/box.
    * Note that your user names really shouldn't contain '/' character.
 * uid: Message's IMAP UID.
 * uidv: Mailbox's UIDVALIDITY. This changes if mailbox gets recreated.
 * box: Mailbox name
 * user: User name who owns the mailbox, or empty for public namespaces
 * hdr: Indexed message headers
 * body: Indexed message body
 * any: "Copy field" from hdr and body, i.e. searching based on this will
   search from both headers and bodies.

Lucene does duplicate suppression based on the "id" field, so even if Dovecot
sends the same message multiple times to Solr it gets indexed only once. This
might happen currently if multiple searches are started at the same time.

You might want to build a cronjob to go through the Lucene indexes once in a
while to delete indexed messages (or entire mailboxes) that no longer exist on
the filesystem. It shouldn't normally find any such messages though.

Testing
-------

---%<-------------------------------------------------------------------------
# telnet localhost imap
* OK [CAPABILITY IMAP4rev1 LITERAL+ SASL-IR LOGIN-REFERRALS ID ENABLE IDLE SORT
SORT=DISPLAY THREAD=REFERENCES THREAD=REFS MULTIAPPEND UNSELECT CHILDREN
NAMESPACE UIDPLUS LIST-EXTENDED I18NLEVEL=1 ESEARCH ESORT SEARCHRES WITHIN
CONTEXT=SEARCH LIST-STATUS STARTTLS AUTH=PLAIN AUTH=LOGIN] I am ready.
1 login username password
2 select Inbox
3 SEARCH text "test"
---%<-------------------------------------------------------------------------

Sharding
--------

If you have more users than fit into a single Solr box, you can split users off
to different servers. A couple of different ways you could do it are:

 * Have some HTTP proxy redirecting the connections based on the URL
 * Configure Dovecot's userdb lookup to return a different host for 'fts_solr'
   setting using <extra fields> [UserDatabase.ExtraFields.txt].
    * LDAP: 'user_attrs = ..., solrHost=fts_solr=url=http://%$:8983/solr/'
    * MySQL: 'user_query = SELECT concat('url=http://', solr_host,
      ':8983/solr/') AS fts_solr, ...'

External Tutorials
------------------

External sites with tutorials on using Solr under Dovecot

 * Installing Apache Solr with Dovecot for fulltext search results
   [http://atmail.com/kb/2009/installing-apache-solr-with-dovecot-for-fulltext-search-results/]
   - Guide for installing all the dependencies for Solr to work under
   CentOS/Fedora. Step by step tutorial.
 * Installing Apache Solr with Dovecot for fulltext search results (ATmail
   support guide)
   [http://support.atmail.com/display/AKB/Installing+Apache+Solr+with+Dovecot+for+fulltext+search+results]

Tipps
-----

Some additional things which might help you configuring Solr search:

 * If you are using Tomcat: Set 'maxHttpHeaderSize="65536"' (connector
   definition for port 8080 in '/etc/tomcat7/server.xml') to accept long search
   query strings (iPhones tend to send multi-kilobyte-sized queries)
 * Set 'df' to 'hdr' in '/etc/solr/conf/solrconfig.xml' ('/select' request
   handler) to avoid strange 'undefined field text' errors.

Recent versions of Solr
-----------------------

With recent versions of Solr (5+), you should have a look at these guides:

 * Linux: http://things.m31.ch/?p=379
 * FreeBSD: http://mor-pah.net/2016/08/15/dovecot-2-2-with-solr-6-or-5/

Please keep in mind that you will have to change the Solr URL to include the
core name (ie:'dovecot': 'http://localhost:8939/solr/dovecot').

(This file was created from the wiki on 2017-10-10 04:42)