System Configuration Guide

The System Configuration Guide provides detailed information about many of the features included with the LucidWorks Platform.

Note for LucidWorks Cloud Users While nearly all of the features described in this section are available to Cloud users, some of the advanced configuration options are not. When editing a setting requires direct access to a configuration file, instead of accessing the setting via the UI or an API, contact your support representative for information about how you might tweak that setting for your needs.

Many of the settings used by the crawlers are configured by default, and can be edited with the $LWE_HOME/conf/lwe-core/default.yml file. More information is available on the page Configuring Default Settings.

Content in LucidWorks is organized into collections, which can each have different documents, data sources, fields, field types and settings. Before starting to configure LucidWorks, it's important to understand how collections work and when you may need to create new ones. Working with Collections provides an overview of how this works. When it's time to create new collections, it is possible to create collection templates to speed the initial setup process.

When ready to start adding documents to the LucidWorks Index, there are several items to consider such as if the fields in the documents are configured correctly and use the proper field types and if the default mapping of documents to the various fields is right. Crawling and Indexing Configuration covers these topics and other options such as synonyms and stop words, setting up a batch-only crawl (where documents are not indexed), and specific advice for particular content repositories. If you need to delete the index and start over, that's covered too.

Once documents have been indexed, the system is ready to serve queries. There are several options available here too, covered in Query and Search Configuration. Users can set up alerts, spell check helps them recover from spelling mistakes, auto-complete prompts users to use terms that are already known to exist in the index, and document highlighting shows the user's search terms in the context of the document.

One issue that is important to users is that the results are relevant to them. We've included a chapter on Understanding and Improving Relevance to understand how relevance ranking works in LucidWorks and what can be done to adjust it if needed. In some situations, the documents that other users have previously selected (either in general or for the same query) may be considered more relevant, and LucidWorks includes the Click Scoring Relevance Framework to take those user clicks into account.

Securing the system should be a high priority, and the section on Security and User Management describes how to integrate LucidWorks with an LDAP or Active Directory server, how to enable SSL for the system, and how to restrict access to content.

System performance is a big factor in getting users to adopt and continue to use the search application. Performance Tips describes how to approach judging and improving performance metrics, while Integrating Monitoring Services shows how to hook LucidWorks into JMX, Zabbix or Nagios to keep an eye on how the system is running. At some point, you may need to increase the number of servers that are indexing and serving user queries - the options are described in Expanding Capacity.

Finally, LucidWorks is built on Solr, and instead of hiding that under the hood, we provide a way to access it natively if that is easier for your application. Solr Direct Access describes how to do that in detail.

LucidWorks Platform User Interface Guide

LucidWorks Platform Documentation v2.0

Lucid Query Parser