Solr Service in Paused State during Sitecore installation

The Problem

I was working on Sitecore installation on a new machine. Everything was running smooth but the SOLR service always ended up in PAUSED state.

The Research

I tried stopping the service and then starting it using NSSM multiple times but it did not help. Then I thought of removing and recreating the service but again no help. And then it was followed by a machine restart and the service still ended up in PAUSED state.

I started googling about this issue and found answers suggesting that may be JAVA_HOME environment variable is not set or may be JAVA is not installed. I opened my command prompt to execute echo %java_home% to get value for JAVA_HOME environment variable and it returned a blank value. This proved there is definitely an issue with JAVA setup on my new machine. Next, I executed java -version in cmd prompt and I found that the new machine is using Microsoft build of openJDK instead of JRE (snapshot below)

It was found that new machine is using openJDK because OpenJDK is a free and open-source implementation of the Java Platform, Standard Edition. Oracle decided to charge for JRE and as a result of that a lot organizations decided to not use JRE and looked for alternatives like openJDK. This seemed like a viable reason why SOLR service stays in PAUSED state.

So, how do I make SOLR service work with Miecrosoft build for openJDK?

Open up Add/Remove programs in Windows
Type in JDK, and click Modify for the Microsoft Build of OpenJDK with Hotspot app

Next, click the Change button
In the Custom Setup for the Set JAVA_HOME variable, select "Entire feature will be installed on local hard drive" and click next

After the installation completed, I executed echo %java_home% and this time it returned a value -

Next, I attempted on restarting my SOLR service and this time is started successfully.
Navigate to your local SOLR admin and confirm it's up and running
Recycle your local app pool and restart your website, then check your index manager to confirm your local site's connection to SOLR.

Though, this is more of SOLR setup issue but even such challenges can delay setup of Sitecore instances. Thanks for reading, I hope it helps you!!!

Sitecore PowerShell Script to create all language versions for an item from en version

We have lots of media items and our business wants to copy the data from en version of media item to all other language versions defined in System/Languages. This ensures that media is available in all the languages. So, we created the below powershell script to achieve the same - #Get all language versions defined in System/Languages $languages = Get-ChildItem /sitecore/System/Languages -recurse | Select $_.name | Where-Object {$_.name -ne "en"} | Select Name #Ensuring correct items are updated by comparing the template ID $items = Get-ChildItem -Path "/sitecore/media library/MyProjects" -Recurse | Where-Object {'<media item template id>' -contains $_.TemplateID} #Bulk update context to improve performance New-UsingBlock (New-Object Sitecore.Data.BulkUpdateContext) { foreach($item in $items){ foreach($language in $languages){ $languageVersion = Get-Item -Path $item.Paths.Path -Language $language.Name #Check if language versi

Export Sitecore media library files to zip using SPE

If you ever require to export Sitecore media files to zip (may be to optimize them), SPE (Sitecore Powershell Extension) has probably the easiest way to do this for you. It's as easy as the below 3 steps - 1. Right click on your folder (icons folder in snap)>Click on Scripts> Click on Download 2. SPE will start zipping all the media files placed within this folder. 3. Once zipping is done, you will see the Download option in the next screen. Click Download Zip containing the media files within is available on your local machine. You can play around with the images now. Hope this helps!! Like and Share ;)

Make Sitecore instance faster using Roslyn Compiler

When we install the Sitecore instance on local, the first load is slow. After each code deploy also, it takes a while for the Sitecore instance to load and experience editor to come up. For us, the load time for Sitecore instance on local machines was around 4 minutes. We started looking for ways to minimize it and found that if we update our Web.config to use Roslyn compiler and include the relevant Nugets into the project, our load times will improve. We followed the simple steps - Go to the Project you wish to add the NuGet package and right click the project and click 'Manage NuGet Packages'. Make sure your 'Package Source' is set to nuget.org and go to the 'Browse' Tab and search Microsoft.CodeDom.Providers.DotNetCompilerPlatform. Install whichever version you desire, make sure you note which version you installed. You can learn more about it here . After installation, deploy your project, make sure the Microsoft.CodeDom.Providers.DotNetCompilerPlatform.d

Experience of a first time Sitecore MVP

The Journey I have been working in Sitecore for almost 10 years now. When I was a beginner in Sitecore, I was highly impressed by the incredible community support. In fact, my initial Sitecore learning path was entirely based on community written blogs on Sitecore. During a discussion with my then technology lead Neeraj Gulia , he proposed the idea that I should start giving back to developer community whenever I get chance. Just like I have been helped by many developers via online blogs, stackoverflow etc., I should also try to help others. Fast forward a few years and I met Nehemiah Jeyakumar (now an MVP). He had a big archive of his technical notes in the form Sitecore blogs. I realized my first blog dont have to be perfect and it can be as simple as notes to a specific problem for reference in future. That's when I probably created my first blog post on Sitecore. At that time, I didn't knew about the Sitecore MVP program. Over the years, I gained more confidence to write

Clean Coding Principles in CSharp

A code shall be easy to read and understand. In this post, I am outlining basic principles about clean coding after researching through expert recommended books, trainings and based on my experience. A common example to start with is a variable declaration like - int i The above statement did not clarify the purpose of variable i. However, the same variable can be declared as - int pageNumber The moment we declared the variable as int pageNumber, our brain realized that the variable is going to store the value for number of pages. We have set the context in our brain now and it is ready to understand what the code is going to do next with these page numbers. This is one of the basic advantages of clean coding. Reasons for clean coding - • Reading clean code is easier - Every code is revisited after certain amount of time either by the same or different developer who created it. In both the cases, if the code is unclean, its difficult to understand and update it. • To avoid s

Ghanendra's Tips

Search This Blog