Saturday, October 17, 2015

How to do Integration tests with Solr 5.x

Please keep in mind that what is described below is valid only if you have a Solr instance with a single core. Thanks to +Alessandro Benedetti for alerting me on this sneaky stuff ;) 
I recently migrated a project [1] from Solr 4.x to Solr 5.x (actually Solr 5.3.1),  and the only annoying stuff has been a (small) refactoring of my integration test suite.

Previously, I always used the cool Maven Cargo plugin for running and stopping Solr (ehmm Jetty with a solr.war deployed in) before and after my suite. For those who are still using Solr 4.x here [2] there's the configuration. It is just a matter of a single command:

> maven install

Unfortunately, Solr 5.x is no longer (formally) a web application, so I'd need to find another way to run the integration suite. After googling a bit I wasn't able to find a solution so I asked to myself : "How do Solr folks run their integration tests?" and I find this artifact [3] on the Maven repository: solr-test-framework..."well, the name sounds good", I said. 

Effectively, I found a lot of already built things that do a lot of stuff for you. In my case, I only had to change a bit my integration suite superclass; actually a simple change because I had to extend from org.apache.solr.SolrJettyTestBase.

This class provides methods for starting and stopping Jetty (yes, still Jetty because even formally Solr is no longer a JEE web application, actually it still is, and it comes bundled with a Jetty, which provides the HTTP connectivity). Starting the servlet container in your methods is up to you, by means of the several createJetty(...) static methods. Instead, that class provides a @BeforeClass annotated method which stops Jetty at the end of the execution, of course in case it has been previously started.

You can find my code here [4], any feedback is warmly welcome ;) 

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[1] https://github.com/agazzarini/SolRDF
[2] pom.xml using the Maven Cargo plugin and Solr 4.10.4
[3] http://mvnrepository.com/artifact/org.apache.solr/solr-test-framework/5.3.1
[4] SolRDF test superclass using the solr-test-framework

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