Search and Azure

Simon Radford

Vote:

Hello,

I'm working on an EPiServer site that is running in Azure (as an actual Azure site, not in a VM). I have not yet made any attempt to set up search and it is not currently working. I do have a lot of experience with EPiServer but have never had to setup or configure searching myself.

To start with I need to get the actual search working in EPiServer (i.e. where you can search for a page or block within the EPiServer interface). This works locally but not in Azure.

Question 1) Does this search function rely on the native EPiServer search indexing, or can it be plugged into another search service?

Question 2) The guide for deploying sites to Azure has a guide to setup the native EPiServer search service as a separate Azure site. However, it says:

"Note that the Azure website running the search service should not be scaled to run on several instances, since this will cause data corruption in the Lucene index. If scaling is needed then use EPiServer Find instead."

I just want to confirm, is this referring to the separate site running the search service, or the EPiServer site itself? I am hoping to scale up instances of the EPiServer site.

To sum up my requirements: I need a search service that can...

- Ideally be used for search in both the EPiServer interface and on the public site (I'm not sure if this is possible as per question 1)

- Will work in Azure even with the site instances scaled up

- Is free!

I have seen a blog post about Microsoft's own Azure Search which sounds promising. Any advice on the matter will be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

Simon R

#91375

Oct 03, 2014 13:15

Johan Björnfot

Vote:

It refers to the site running serach service not the site it self. That is you can scale your cms sites.

For basic free text search running EPiServer Search as a separate Azure WebSite should be fine.

#91376

Oct 03, 2014 13:23

Simon Radford

Vote:

Excellent, thank you. I'll setup EPiServer search which should keep us going for the time being.

#91383

Oct 03, 2014 15:04

Maryam Sarrafkia

Vote:

Hello!

What is the address of appdatapath that you have addded to your web.config?

<episerver.search.indexingservice>
    <clients>
        <add name="local" description="local" allowLocal="true" ipAddress="<ipaddress here>" readonly="false"/>
    </clients>
    <namedIndexes defaultIndex="default">
        <indexes>
            <add name="default" directoryPath="[appDataPath]\Index" readonly="false"/>
        </indexes>
    </namedIndexes>
</episerver.search.indexingservice>

Could you fix the search using Azure website?

Regards,

Maryam

#115391

Edited, Jan 14, 2015 13:39