Awesome

Heliosphere

The problem with Sunspot is that it doesn't check if Solr is really running. This means that you get a nasty connection refused error whenever you save or destroy a record. We don't want that, the search engine is usually less important than the feature that saves models.

Heliosphere tries to solve that, by making the commit hooks a bit safer. It will index if Solr is available, but send a request to Hoptoad if its not there. You will manually have to reindex updated and destroyed records.

The trick Heliosphere is doing is using the Unix tool netstat to check if Solr is really running and excepting requests.

There are also some helpers for Rake, Cucumber and RSpec.

Installation

The definition of the indexes go outside your model. Create a stub by running:

rails generate heliosphere

Modify the generated initializer to get it up and running.

Testing Solr status by hand

Although saving records won't work now, you'll want to disable search forms or show a notice to the user. To check manually if Solr is running:

Heliosphere.up?
# or ...
Heliosphere.down?

Rake tasks

There are alternative Rake tasks for starting/stopping/reindexing safely. The rake tasks won't fire up and forget, but wait until the server is really running. If Solr is already running, start won't complain, if it isn't running than stop won't complain. This means that restart will always work, no matter if solr is running or not.

Cucumber & RSpec

Add this for Cucumber:

Before("~@search") do
  Heliosphere::Stubs.without_search
end

Before("@search") do
  Heliosphere::Stubs.with_search
end

And this for RSpec:

RSpec.configure do |config|
  config.extend  Heliosphere::RSpec
end

Afterwards, use with_search and without_search inside describe blocks:

describe User do
  without_search
  it "will update records without indexing it in Solr"
end

Todo

Write tests
Add Capistrano support
Maybe forcefully stop Solr within testsuite
Support other ways of notifying instead of just Hoptoad