This document describes about the changes you need to be done when running DJANGO haystack with SOLR 6+. Thanks for @github/nazariyg most of the configuration I learnt from following link https://github.com/nazariyg/Solr-5-for-django-haystack

Assumptions

-SOLR core is created and you know the path of the SOLR core

Steps

Configuring the solrconfig.xml

• Open [SOLR_CORE_PATH]/conf/solrconfig.xml
• Search for configrations for ManagedIndexSchemaFactory and remove them all.
• Add following configuration to the solrconfig.xml file

  <schemaFactory class="ClassicIndexSchemaFactory"/>

• Search for the following XML element and comment the whole element

  <processor class="solr.AddSchemaFieldsUpdateProcessorFactory">

• Rename the [SOLR_CORE_PATH]/conf/managed-schema to schema.xml
• Restart the solr instacnce and make sure the core is working without any issues.

Also You can have a look on the solrconfig.xml available in solr_config folder.

Configuring the schema.xml

• Copy the schema/schema.xml to TEMPLATE_FOLDER/search_configuration folder. The scehma.xml is the renamed managed-schema file in the previous step, but it has additional changes to integrate indexes made by haystack and your application.
• You can deploy the new schema by running the following command

   python manage.py build_solr_schema --filename=[SOLR base folder]/server/solr/[CORE_NAME]/conf/schema.xml && curl 'http://localhost:8983/solr/admin/cores?action=RELOAD&core=[CORE_NAME]&wt=json&indent=true'

Following are the changes

• The haystack related configurations , you can see this starting from the following comment

     <!--
    ######################## django-haystack specifics begin ########################
    -->

• The id field is removed from the original schema.xml , because it is already added by the django-haystack specfic configurations

<field name="id" type="string" indexed="true" stored="true" required="true" multiValued="false" />

Issues and resolutions

Timestamp might fail when indexing

After changing to use SOLR6 if you encounter the following error for timestamp field

Solr responded with an error (HTTP 400): [Reason: Invalid Date in Date Math String:

override the timestamp field in index to return the following format

%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%SZ

Ex:

import datetime
from haystack import indexes
from myapp.models import Note

class NoteIndex(indexes.SearchIndex, indexes.Indexable):

 postedDate = indexes.DateTimeField(model_attr='postedDate')

def prepare_postedDate(self,obj):
        return obj.postedDate.strftime('%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%SZ')