How to reindex your Sunspot Solr models without dropping the entire index first.

If you’re using the Ruby on Rails Sunspot gem for searching your models, running rake sunspot:solr:reindex will drop your entire index before reindexing the models.

If you want to reindex the models gracefully without dropping the indexes first, you can put this task in lib/tasks/sunspot_tasks.rake:

# lib/tasks/sunspot_tasks.rake

namespace :sunspot do
task :reindex_gracefully => :environment do
Dir.glob(Rails.root.join(‘app/models/**/*.rb’)).each { |path| require path }
sunspot_models = Sunspot.searchable

index_options = { :batch_commit => false }

begin
require ‘progress_bar’
total_documents = sunspot_models.map { | m | m.count }.sum
index_options[:progress_bar] = ProgressBar.new(total_documents)
rescue LoadError => e
$stdout.puts “Skipping progress bar: for progress reporting, add gem ‘progress_bar’ to your Gemfile”
rescue Exception => e
$stderr.puts “Error using progress bar: #{e.message}”
end

sunspot_models.each do |model|
model.solr_index index_options
end
end
end
The task is a simplified, slightly modified version of Sunspot’s built-in sunspot:reindex task.

Then run:

$ rake sunspot:reindex_gracefully
Now you can reindex without dropping the index. Enjoy 🙂