Blacklight is an open source Solr user interface discovery platform. You can use Blacklight to enable searching and browsing of your collections. Blacklight uses the Apache Solr search engine to search full text and/or metadata. Blacklight has a highly configurable Ruby on Rails front-end. Blacklight was originally developed at the University of Virginia Library and is made public under an Apache 2.0 license.

Add Blacklight to your Gemfile:

gem "blacklight"

Run the install generator which will copy over some initial templates, migrations, routes, and configuration:

rails generate blacklight:install

• Project Homepage
• Developer Documentation
• Quickstart Guide
• Issue Tracker
• Support

• Ruby 2.2+
• Bundler
• Rails 5.1+

You'll also want some information about how Blacklight expects Apache Solr to run, which you can find in README_SOLR

The javascript is built by npm from sources in app/javascript into a bundle in app/assets/javascripts/blacklight/blacklight.js. This file should not be edited by hand as any changes would be overwritten. When any of the javascript components in the gem are changed, this bundle should be rebuild with the following steps:

1. Install npm
2. run npm install to download dependencies
3. run npm run js-compile-bundle to build the bundle
4. run npm publish to push the javascript package to https://npmjs.org/package/blacklight-frontend

Blacklight ships with Javascript that can be compiled either by Webpacker or by Sprockets. To use Webpacker see the directions at https://github.com/projectblacklight/blacklight/wiki/Using-Webpacker-to-compile-javascript-assets

If you prefer to use Sprockets, simply run the install generator, which will run the assets generator. For details see https://github.com/projectblacklight/blacklight/wiki/Using-Sprockets-to-compile-javascript-assets