Please note: The main Blacklight website is projectblacklight.org

Installing Blacklight

Some background information

Blacklight is open source discovery software. Libraries (or anyone else) can use blacklight to enable searching and browsing of their collections online. Blacklight uses Solr to index and search text and/or metadata, and it has a highly configurable Ruby on Rails front-end. Currently, Blacklight can index, search, and provide faceted browsing for MaRC records and EAD XML files, and support is planned for Dublin Core and MODS as well. Blacklight was originally developed at the University of Virginia Library and is made public under an Apache 2.0 license. As of version 2.2.0 (released June 8, 2009), Blacklight is distributed as an engines plugin and as a demo application that uses the engines plugin.

Which one should I install?

There are two ways of installing Blacklight. You can either install a pre-configured demo app, which already has the Blacklight plugin installed and integrated, or you can install the plugin into an existing rails application.

If you’re just getting started with Blacklight and want to get something up and running relatively quickly, start by installing the demo app. This will give you a good introduction to the pieces of the Blacklight system before you start customizing your own installation.

If you want to integrate Blacklight search and discovery into another rails app, or if you already have a customized copy of Blacklight and you only want to upgrade the plugin, you want the plugin installation instructions.

Pre-requisites

Whichever method you choose for installation, be sure you have all the pre-requisites in place. You can find these detailed in PRE-REQUISITES.rdoc

Installing the demo app

Instructions for installing the demo app are contained in the file DEMO_README

Installing the plugin into an existing rails app

Instructions for installing the demo app are contained in the plugin’s README.rdoc

Running solr

You’ll also want some information about how Blacklight expects solr to run, which you can find in README_SOLR.rdoc