[Koha] Question about running PLACK

[Bob Birchall]

Hi Martin,
Zebra is Koha's indexing engine.  Check the manual for documentation 
about the daemon or the cron job for rebuilds.  In most production 
instances, Zebra is updated very frequently. Full rebuilds are needed 
rarely.
Koha can now also use Elastic Search though this is still experimental.  
Stick with Zebra for now.

Plack is middleware that improves Koha's performance.  As Mirko said, it 
has nothing to do with Zebra.

So there has been some confusion in the information the vendor gave you, 
or that you received.  Never mind.

If however that vendor is making changes and not contributing those 
changes to Koha, that is not unique in the world, but it should give you 
pause.  It implies the vendor is making the software available as a 
cloud service only.  If they are distributing the software, they must 
provide the source code or they will be in breach of Koha's license.  
 From the viewpoint of a library choosing a vendor, the relevant 
question is whether you want to be part of a world wide community-driven 
project, or with a vendor who takes the output of the community's effort 
but thinks they'll get some advantage from keeping their own efforts 
secret.  That route raises a number of risks for libraries including 
using software that has not passed Koha's rather rigorous QA process and 
ultimately perhaps becoming locked in to the vendor's fork.

Each library makes that choice for themselves.  There is a list of 
vendors at koha-community.org though the project does not endorse 
these.  Make your own inquiries including checking Koha's About page (in 
the staff client) Release Notes, meeting minutes and mailing lists to 
see who is contributing to Koha and speaking with customers of the vendor.

Regards,
Bob Birchall
Calyx

On 14/12/16 04:25, Martin House wrote:
> Well, darn. I asked the question because a third party vendor I contacted
> suggested that plack could replace zebra as the overall index. Of course,
> I'm investigating moving our self-hosted system over to this company. :)
> Shows you how much I know. (or how much this vendor knows). That said, the
> vendor did say they have developed koha on their own, and made
> modifications. I just assumed that I could do the same, with plack as they
> have.
>
> That's a bummer. I may need to see about setting up cron jobs that will
> call zebra-rebuild daily. I tried that but have not been very successful.
>
> Thanks (Vielen Dank!)
>
> Martin
>
> Martin House
> martin.house at gmail.com
> www.martindhouse.com
> 704-996-0297
> "An unexamined life is not worth living."
>
>
> On Tue, Dec 13, 2016 at 12:19 PM, Mirko Tietgen <mirko at abunchofthings.net>
> wrote:
>
>> Hi,
>>
>> Martin House schrieb am 13.12.2016
>>> Is there anything I should be aware of, before moving my production
>> server
>>> from zebra to plack?
>> That question does not work. Plack does not index your data as Zebra
>> does. You can't do what you describe here.
>>
>> In other words, have any of you run in to issues that
>>> may not be noted in the official instructions? My follow up question is,
>> do
>>> I need to remove zebra after plack install, or do I just leave it sitting
>>> there?
>> You cannot remove Zebra or Koha will break. You cannot exchange
>> Plack for Zebra, because Plack does not do what Zebra does.
>>
>>> I've looked at a few sites, and can't find concrete answers to these
>>> questions.
>> Try asking the right questions. Are you really talking about Plack?
>> Are you maybe thinking about Elasticsearch instead?
>>
>>> PS. I'm sick of having to run zebra-reindex every day, manually, so I
>>> figure it's time to investigate plack.
>> Why would you manually run Zebra? Use the indexer daemon or at least
>> a cron job.
>>
>> HTH,
>>
>> Mirko
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