As part of making Solr easier to use for new developers, one of the JIRA's I had filed was:
SOLR-4431: Developer Curb Appeal: easier URL to get to Cloud UI https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/SOLR-4431 I've been trying to understand why we have such odd URLs in the first place, and could they be simplified? I'm talking about URLs like: http://localhost:8983/solr/#/ http://localhost:8983/solr/#/~cores http://localhost:8983/solr/#/~cloud I'm sure there's logical reasons for all of this, but I've had trouble finding the original discussion threads on Google (terms like Solr and URL have huge match sets) I looked around Solr's web.xml file and I see some references to # and ~, but it doesn't really explain it, and there's a comment ("Remove in Solr 5.0") that applies to at least one of the mappings; I wasn't sure of the scope. Specific questions: * I assume this was discussed, maybe in JIRA? I was looking for the original threads * or, Why was this done? * Did it strike anybody as odd at that time? * Is this changing in Solr 5? If so, to what? * Or, could it be easily changed to remove "#/~" parts? (I imagine each character has it's own reason for existing) So ideally it'd be: http://localhost:8983/solr/cores http://localhost:8983/solr/cloud * If it can't be easily changed due to some architectural issue, could we add some simple redirects to the web.xml file? (Even if we did change the URLs, we'd probably want redirects to preserve the old URLs for a while) * Could we add web.xml rules to allow for Solr to be the root app? So in default Jetty: http://localhost:8983/admin http://localhost:8983/cores http://localhost:8983/cloud http://localhost:8983/search/collection1?q=... I suspect the current URL structure is there for very good reasons, and seemed like a good idea a few years ago. And I imagine somebody might have even said "nobody types in URLs, they just bookmark everything!". But developers and admins DO type in URLs all the time, and making things easier for new developers is really important. And remember #'s and ~'s if you don't use the tool every single day seems like a needless hassle. Is there some reasonable compromise here, maybe just with redirects, to make Solr URL's really simple? Thanks for any info or links or comments! Mark -- Mark Bennett / LucidWorks: Search & Big Data / mark.benn...@lucidworks.com Office: 408-898-4201 / Telecommute: 408-733-0387 / Cell: 408-829-6513
