Alternative MusicBrainz search server

If you are working with a local MusicBrainz database and want to search in it, there aren’t that many choices. You can use the internal PostgreSQL full-text search or you can use the official MusicBrainz search server.

I’ve been playing with the idea of a customizable Solr-based solution for a long time. Creating a simple Solr index with the MusicBrainz data is not hard, but keeping it up to date is more complicated.

The mbslave package now includes a few scripts for creating and updating a Solr search index. See the README file for more information on how to set it up.

There are a few differences compared to the official MusicBrainz search server:

• Everything is in a single index, so there is no need to tell it which entity you are interested in. If you want to restrict the search to a particular entity, use filter query (e.g. fq=kind:artist).
• It’s easy to extend the index to include more fields. There is no configuration file for this yet, but you can edit the field definition directly in the source code.
• It doesn’t store as much data as the MusicBrainz search server. The intended workflow is to use the database for displaying results.

I wrote it primarily for my own needs, but if it ends up being useful to people, I’ll probably make it more configurable and move to a separate package as it does not necessarily depend on mbslave.