November 12th 2015

eZ announces the availability of 5.4.5, a maintenance release available for all users of eZ Publish Platform 5.4. In addition to 18 bug fixes, it adds two packages that are part of the upcoming eZ Platform release: Solr as a repository search engine, and a revamped Recommendation engine integration.

Follow the 5.4.x Update Instructions to apply this update to your platforms.

As part of eZ Platform forward compatibility efforts done on 5.4 during 2015, this release backported an API BC break on eZ\Publish\API\Repository\Values\Content\Query->limit property where default value is changed from undefined (unlimited) to 25, to fix unpredictable search results with Solr (and Elastic Search). Make sure to check your Content and Location queries to specify a limit when you expect more than 25 items to get consistent behavior across versions.

As usual this is documented in doc/bc folder, in this case in kernel package: vendor/ezsystems/ezpublish-kernel/doc/bc/changes-5.4.md

Highlights: New Features

This maintenance release introduces a new eZ Platform package: support for Solr as a Repository search engine. Besides this there are several maintenance issues fixed as listed below both coming from support issues and pull requests from community.

Improved Search engine powered by Solr

New in 5.4.5, and part of the upcoming eZ Platform release this fall, is support for running API Search queries (Content, ContentInfo and Location) on top of Solr instead of SQL based search engine (specifically "Legacy" search engine). As Search is essentially powering all Search and Querying ("fetch") operations in Platform stack (aka 5.x/Symfony stack), this specifically means you can expect much more stable performance from your system*, and much better possibility to scale out for your query needs using SolrCloud.

'* See 5.x Architecture diagram for further information about how persistence load operations are cached by Persistence Cache, and Search queries now are delegated to Solr, meaning database is less affected by system load to mainly deal with content updates.

Further reading: Installation documentation for Solr Search Engine Bundle, developer info and source code in our ezplatform-solr-search-engine repository, and further resources on Apache Solr itself.

Package Details

Resolving known configuration issues

Known for both Solr and Recommendation:

Exception if Binary files in database has invalid path prefix

Make sure ezpublish.yml configuration var_dir is configured properly, and that you specify siteaccess (--siteaccess=<name>) when performing initial indexing via command line.

Exception on unsupported Field Types
Make sure to implement all FieldTypes (aka datatypes) in your installation, or configure missing once as NullType if implementation is not possible/needed.
Content not immediately available
- Solr Bundle: Is on purpose not committing changes directly on Repository updates, but letting you control this using Solr configuration. Adjust Solr autoSoftCommit (visibility of change to search index) and autoCommit (hard commit, for durability and replication) to balance performance and load on your Solr instance against needs you have for NRT.
- Recommendation service: Content should be available within 5-10 minutes after content has been sent to the service by RecommendationBundle.
Running out of memory during indexing
- For Stash, make sure to run indexing using prod evn, and make sure to disable in_memory cache as recommended on Persistence cache doc.
- For Flysystem, an open issue exists where you can find further infohttps://jira.ez.no/browse/EZP-25325

If you still have problems, pop into our Slack channel at https://ezcommunity.slack.com/messages/ezplatform-use/ to discuss.

Package updates

Here are the ezsystems packages that have received an update as part of this release: