The original reason for writing this code was to create a quick proof-of-concept demonstrating a problem I was having with filters in Lucene. When I added a filter my query returned zero results. As Uwe Schindler pointed out this happened because my code told Lucene to analyze the field, while filters expect a literal value unless you customize them with an analyzer on the query side. Thanks, Uwe!

Now I took the time to write this abstract example of how I use Lucene with Clojure, I'm planning to keep it up as reference for others. That way, the code will serve some purpose now the problem is solved. Of course, any errors or non-idiomatic usage should be fixed by that point. Keep in mind that this is the first Clojure code I'm releasing, only two weeks after first picking up the language, so there might be a few non-idiomatic gotchas lurking around!

Running the code is easy (assuming you have Leiningen installed):

git clone https://github.com/fmw/clojure-lucene-demo.git
cd clojure-lucene-demo
lein test

Check Mark Triggs' Mailindex repository for another example of Lucene code in Clojure. Also, make sure to look at the unit tests, because they provide the best documentation to the code. Feel free to contact me using the email address below in case you have any questions or suggestions.

Copyright 2011, F.M. (Filip) de Waard <[email protected]>. Distributed under the Apache License, version 2 (see the LICENSE file).