Publication Process | Apache Solr Reference Guide 7.0

About the Formats

The Solr Ref Guide is published in two formats: PDF and HTML.

The PDF version is the official release, and requires a vote before release. See Publishing PDF Version for details on how to generate the PDF and hold a vote.

The HTML version is considered a "convenience" version, and does not require a vote. See Publishing HTML Version for details on how to publish the HTML.

It’s strongly preferred that both PDF and HTML versions are available during the vote for the PDF. However, since the HTML version is not an official release, it is more of an unwritten rule to publish the HTML at the same time as producing a release candidate for the PDF.

Publishing PDF Version

The PDF version of the Solr Reference Guide is the official version. As such, it is voted on by the community before release, and is treated as an official artifact of the Lucene/Solr project.

Prerequisites

You have checked out the Lucene/Solr source code on the machine you will be doing the release from. You will need scripts in the dev-tools directory.
You have generated a GPG key. See the Apache documentation on generating a code signing key.
You have Python 3 installed. This is needed to poll the mirrors after release to be sure it’s propagated enough to make the announcement.

Generate the PDF

No local dependencies are required to build the PDF. The Ant target will download the jars and other items it requires.

The build process generates the PDF, including the page hierarchy, and then runs an optimization script on the PDF to make it smaller.

To build the PDF:

Run ant build-pdf -Dsolr-guide-version=X.Y
The resulting PDF will be in solr/build/solr-ref-guide.

The -Dsolr-guide-version system property is optional. By default the build system uses the version.properties of the current branch and assumes this is a DRAFT build.

Prepare and Upload Release Candidate

The dist/dev Subversion repository includes a directory for the Solr Ref Guide at lucene/solr/ref-guide which can host the release candidate (RC) during the VOTE stage of the process.

These steps walk through checking out this directory and uploading the Guide to it.

Checkout the directory: svn co https://dist.apache.org/repos/dist/dev/lucene/solr/ref-guide solr-ref-guide-rc
- If you have already checked out this directory, you can simply update it: svn update solr-ref-guide-rc
Change directories so solr-ref-guide-rc is your working directory (cd solr-ref-guide-rc).

The next step requires that you have already generated your GPG keys. Your GPG passphrase will be required.

Run the Prep Ref Guide script to prepare the RC. This script ensures proper naming of the PDF file, generates .sha1 and .asc files and creates the proper RC sub-directories under solr-ref-guide-rc.

The structure of the input is: prep-solr-ref-guide-rc.sh <path/PDFfilename> <Solrversion-RC#> GPGkey.

From the solr-ref-guide-rc directory, it will look something like this:

$ ~/lucene-source/dev-tools/scripts/prep-solr-ref-guide-rc.sh apache-solr-ref-guide-7.0.pdf 7.0-RC0

+ mkdir apache-solr-ref-guide-7.0-RC0
+ mv apache-solr-ref-guide-7.0.pdf apache-solr-ref-guide-7.0-RC0/apache-solr-ref-guide-7.0.pdf
+ cd apache-solr-ref-guide-7.0-RC0
+ sha1sum apache-solr-ref-guide-7.0.pdf
+ gpg -u DEADBEEF --armor --output apache-solr-ref-guide-7.0.pdf.asc --detach-sig apache-solr-ref-guide-7.0.pdf

You need a passphrase to unlock the secret key for
user: "Your Name <you@apache.org>"
4096-bit RSA key, ID DEADBEEF, created 1969-07-04

Add and commit the new release candidate to the dist/dev with these steps:
1. svn add apache-solr-ref-guide-7.0-RC0
2. svn commit -m "7.0 ref guide RC0"

Hold a VOTE

Votes must be sent to the lucene-dev mailing list (dev@lucene.apache.org).

Send an email to dev@lucene.apache.org with subject, "VOTE: Release Apache Solr Ref Guide for Solr X.Y".
The body of the email should include the full URL of the RC directory in the dist/dev repo. Such as: https://dist.apache.org/repos/dist/dev/lucene/solr/ref-guide/apache-solr-ref-guide-7.0-RC0
You can add your own +1 to the vote announcement email.
If there are issues that need to be resolved, you can start the process over, using RC1, RC2, etc., as needed.

Ideally, the HTML version will also be available for voters to evaluate, see the section Publishing HTML Version below for details of how to do that.

Publish to Production & Archive Old Versions

Once at least three PMC members have voted for release (see Apache Voting Process for details on the rules for votes), the release candidate can be released.

Use the Publish Solr Ref Guide script (publish-solr-ref-guide.sh) to generate the proper SVN commands to be run to execute a remote move of the RC files to the final dist/releases repository.

The script takes only the version and RC number that passed the vote as inputs, such as 7.0-RC0.

The input and output of the script will look like this:

$ ~/lucene-source/dev-tools/scripts/publish-solr-ref-guide-rc.sh X.Y-RCZ

## Run the following commands when ready...
svn move -m 'publishing apache-solr-ref-guide-X.Y-RCZ' https://dist.apache.org/repos/dist/dev/lucene/solr/ref-guide/apache-solr-ref-guide-X.Y-RCZ/apache-solr-ref-guide-X.Y.pdf https://dist.apache.org/repos/dist/dev/lucene/solr/ref-guide/apache-solr-ref-guide-X.Y-RCZ/apache-solr-ref-guide-X.Y.pdf.asc https://dist.apache.org/repos/dist/dev/lucene/solr/ref-guide/apache-solr-ref-guide-X.Y-RCZ/apache-solr-ref-guide-X.Y.pdf.sha1 https://dist.apache.org/repos/dist/release/lucene/solr/ref-guide/

svn rm -m 'cleaning up apache-solr-ref-guide-X.Y-RCZ' https://dist.apache.org/repos/dist/dev/lucene/solr/ref-guide/apache-solr-ref-guide-X.Y-RCZ

The release should propagate to as many mirrors as possible before announcing the release, generally 24 hours is long enough. Use the Poll Mirrors script (poll-mirrors.py) to check the status:
```
python3 -u ~/lucene-source/dev-tools/scripts/poll-mirrors.py -details -p lucene/solr/ref-guide/apache-solr-ref-guide-X.Y.pdf
```
- This script requires Python 3 to be installed on your machine.
- If you have over 85% of the mirrors with the file, it’s OK to go ahead with the announcement.
You may get an automated email about updating the ASF release repository; you can safely ignore this email.

The dist/releases repo is only meant to keep the latest releases. Shortly after new releases are mirrored, they are copied to archive.apache.org, so older releases can safely be deleted from dist/releases since they have been backed up in the archives.

Run the Archive Ref Guide script (archive-solr-ref-guide.sh) using the X.Y version of the Ref Guide that has just been published. Older RCs will also be removed.

Again, this script doesn’t do any direct removal of files, it only outputs SVN commands for you to copy and paste:

$ ~/lucene-source/dev-tools/scripts/archive-solr-ref-guide.sh X.Y
## Run the following commands when ready...

# Delete old releases
svn rm -m 'removing archived ref guide files prior to X.Y' https://dist.apache.org/repos/dist/release/lucene/solr/ref-guide/apache-solr-ref-guide-A.B.pdf https://dist.apache.org/repos/dist/release/lucene/solr/ref-guide/apache-solr-ref-guide-A.B.pdf.asc https://dist.apache.org/repos/dist/release/lucene/solr/ref-guide/apache-solr-ref-guide-A.B.pdf.sha1

# Delete old RC files
svn rm -m 'cleaning up old RCs now that X.Y has been released' https://dist.apache.org/repos/dist/dev/lucene/solr/ref-guide/apache-solr-ref-guide-X.Y-RC0/ https://dist.apache.org/repos/dist/dev/lucene/solr/ref-guide/apache-solr-ref-guide-X.Y-RC1/

Announce the Release

Announce the availability of the new Ref Guide on solr-user@lucene.apache.org and CC general@lucene.apache.org and announce@apache.org.

You must send the announcement email from your @apache.org email address or announce@apache will reject it.

Always use the link to the download redirector for the announcement, as it will automatically direct users to the closest mirror for download: https://www.apache.org/dyn/closer.cgi/lucene/solr/ref-guide/apache-solr-ref-guide-X.Y.pdf.

You could also include a link to the HTML version in your announcement, if the publication process for that has finished.

Publishing HTML Version

The steps to publish the Guide differ depending on if it is the first time the Guide has been published or if it is an update to an already published Guide.

Building the HTML Version

If you have the required dependencies on your local machine, you can build the HTML version with ant build-site -Dsolr-guide-version=X.Y. The dependencies are listed in solr-ref-guide/README.adoc.

Tip: If you do not have the required dependencies, and don’t choose to install them, you can download the files from the Jenkins (Solr Reference Guide job). But these HTML pages will have the DRAFT status noted in them and will not be suitable for publishing.

Publish a New Guide

Step 1: Update extpaths.txt in CMS Staging

Checkout CMS trunk:
```
svn co --depth=immediates https://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/lucene/cms/trunk/content website-source
```
- If you already have this repo checked out, you can simply svn up website-source to update to the latest revision.
cd website-source
Add Guide branch dir: echo solr/guide/X_Y >> extpaths.txt

Commit changes:

svn commit -m "Update CMS production sync exceptions for X_Y_Z Guide" extpaths.txt

Step 2: Push Guide to Website Production

Go to the checkout directory where you have built the Guide and push the documentation via subversion import. You must push it to the path you just added to extpaths.txt, so if the path you added was solr/guide/6_5, you’ll use the path as shown in the below example:

svn -m "Add Ref Guide for Solr 6.5" import <checkoutroot>/solr/build/solr-ref-guide/html-site https://svn.apache.org/repos/infra/websites/production/lucene/content/solr/guide/6_5

Confirm you can browse to these URLs manually, and especially that solr javadocs link back to lucene’s correctly. Example: https://lucene.apache.org/solr/guide/6_5

Step 3: Push Staging extpaths.txt to Production

The extpaths.txt works by listing paths that should be ignored when the CMS syncs the staging and production repositories. Publishing staging to production will only succeed if the paths listed in extpaths.txt exist in production. At the same time, if a path exists in production but not in staging it will be deleted unless it is defined in extpaths.txt. After pushing the content to production, check that the extpaths.txt in production includes the proper path to ensure that the Guide is not deleted incorrectly. If it does not exist in production, try to publish the site again to make sure it is updated.

Production URL: https://lucene.apache.org/extpaths.txt

Update Ref Guide Landing Page

Update the landing page at https://lucene.apache.org/solr/guide to link to the newest version.

You can use the CMS system for this since it is a small change, or you can edit the file locally and commit it to the staging repo.

Update a Published Guide

If you need to re-publish an existing online copy of the Guide, you will need to checkout the directory in production website repository and overwrite the existing files:

Build the new HTML files locally (ant clean build-site), or download them from Jenkins.
Checkout the directory you need to update from the production repo: svn co https://svn.apache.org/repos/infra/websites/production/lucene/content/solr/guide/<dir>;.
- This command checks out the Guide version directory into a local subdirectory with the same name as the version (such as "6_5"). You can provide a better name locally if you prefer by adding it to the end of the command shown above.
- Don’t shortcut this and download the whole production website. It will take an incredibly long time and that will feel like forever.
Copy the files from the build location to the checked out Guide directory. For example, if we needed to replace the current Guide for Solr 6.5, we’d do cp -r <checkoutroot>/solr/build/html-site 6_5/.
Use svn status to see the files modified.
If there are any pages added or deleted, use svn add <file> or svn rm <file> as needed.
Commit the changes: svn commit -m "Update production 6.5 Ref Guide"