Constellio dev environment

Disclaimer: This blog is not really new, as it’s just the migration of the technical content of our website – see further down for the French version.

This tutorial explains how to start Constellio in a development environment. The first part shows how to download, setup and start Constellio in Eclipse with the default database (Derby). The second part shows how to install MySQL and to configure Constellio to use this database. Continue reading

Backup Constellio Collections and Connectors

Disclaimer: This blog is not really new, as it’s just the migration of the technical content of our website – see further down for the French version.

English: This tutorial explains how to backup and restore Collections and Connectors in Constellio.

French: Cette vidéo explique comment sauvegarder puis restaurer des Collections et des Connecteurs dans Constellio. Continue reading

Create a plugin for Constellio

Disclaimer: This blog is not really new, as it’s just the migration of the technical content of our website – see further down for the French version.

France Labs, the european partner of Doculibre on the Constellio solution, gives you this video explaining how to create a plugin for Constellio. Constellio is currently the most complete open source enterprise search solution available. Continue reading

Active Directory

Disclaimer: This blog is not really new, as it’s just the migration of the technical content of our website – see further down for the French version.

NOTE: If you are interested in using AD with Solr, you may want to look at our Datafari software (still in Alpha version), which combines Apache ManifoldCF with Solr, so it eases this kind of integration. The code is available on google code: http://code.google.com/p/datafari/

In enterprise environments, enterprise search often needs a security aspect which is not necessary for standard web search. In order to assist you, we release here a small code in order to allow Constellio 1.2 (and probably 1.3 although we didn’t test it) to connect to an Active Directory in order to do the credentials check at authentication time. Here is how it works: Continue reading

Virtual Image for Constellio 1.3

Disclaimer: This blog is not really new, as it’s just the migration of the technical content of our website – see further down for the French version.

Open source is like that, you want to give it a try by yourself. In order to for you to gain time, we set up a virtual box image of a running Constellio.
This way you can right start playing with the search and with the admin interface. So that it works right away, we even put a sample collection with a connector that crawls by default the France Labs website. So the first customisation we’d recommend is to edit this connector in order to point to the website you desire, for instance your local intranet in case you have one. The image is approx 500 MB big, so please be patient. Continue reading

Potential security risk if you use Solr together with an internet facing CMS

We recently stumbled upon a detailed article on a Solr attack using SSRF, by Nicolas Grégoire. To summarise: if you think you are safe because you have your Solr hidden behind another system, and that you have only a http server facing the web to make things ok, you may have problems you did not think about.

While reading this article, I was thinking about use cases related to CMS systems with users management, and which are accessible from the web. They are a good fit for such attacks. The good news is that Solr 4.6 solves this vulnerability. The bad news is that you need to do your migration quickly if you want to sleep well 😉

Tutorial on Authorizations for Manifold CF and Solr

NOTE: If you are interested in using ManifoldCF with Solr, you may want to look at our Datafari software , which combines Apache ManifoldCF with Solr, so it eases this kind of integration. The code is available on google code: https://github.com/francelabs/datafari

Manifold CF (MCF) provides a early-binding authorization mechanism for file searchs. The aim of this entry is to will describe this mechanism, and then to show you the different steps needed to configure MCF and Solr to use this fonctionnality.

MCF extracts ACLs from files at crawling-time, and injects them into Solr as specific fields for the Solr document. Continue reading

Tutorial for combining ManifoldCF and Solr for files search

NOTE: If you are interested in using ManifoldCF with Solr, you may want to look at our Datafari software, which combines Apache ManifoldCF with Solr, so it eases this kind of integration. The code is available on google code: https://github.com/francelabs/datafari

With the arrival of Manifold CF 1.0 (now already in v2.5), the open source community is looking for tutorials to combine it with Solr 4. That’s the intent of this tutorial, which will drive you through the different steps required to make it work.

First, we’ll recap the installation process of Manifold CF (we’ll call it MCF later on), and of Solr. Second, we’ll configure both tools so that they can interact with each other. Third, we’ll configure MCF so that it crawls a windows file share. In this tutorial, when I specify installation directory such as solr-4.1.0, you have to complete with the absolute path of the installation directory. Continue reading

Slow Constellio admin interface

During a customer installation of Constellio 1.3, we have noticed an utterly slow loading of the admin interface, which is rather unusual (it is not that slow on other installs with the same amount of indexed content).
After an analysis, we have identified that the Constellio admin UI triggers every 5 seconds a query to its Solr, in order to know the number of indexed files, so as to update this figure in its admin UI. And in our particular installation, this query was taking an awful time to be processed (although the user queries were very fast). We could have changed the query frequency, but even the query by itself was slow. So we decided to change the query in order to have a much better query time. Continue reading