Version Detection

solrpy automatically detects the Solr version at connection time and uses it to gate features at runtime.

How it works

When a Solr instance is created, _detect_version() is called during initialization:

1. JSON API (Solr 4.0+): GET /admin/info/system?wt=json

2. XML fallback (Solr 3.x): GET /admin/info/system?wt=xml

3. Default: (1, 2, 0) with a warning log if both attempts fail

Both the core path and its parent path are tried, so URLs like http://host:8983/solr/core0 will also check /solr/admin/info/system.

Accessing the version

The detected version is stored as a tuple:

import solr

conn = solr.Solr('http://localhost:8983/solr/mycore')
print(conn.server_version)  # e.g. (6, 6, 6)

major, minor, patch = conn.server_version
if major >= 9:
    print('KNN search is available')

SolrVersionError

When a feature requires a Solr version higher than what is connected, a SolrVersionError is raised:

import solr

conn = solr.Solr('http://localhost:8983/solr/mycore')
# if connected to Solr 3.x:
# solr.core.SolrVersionError: atomic_update requires Solr 4.0+,
#                              but connected to Solr 3.6.2

The exception has these attributes:

Attribute	Description
feature	Name of the feature that was called
required	Minimum version tuple required, e.g. (4, 0)
actual	Detected server version tuple, e.g. (3, 6, 2)

requires_version decorator

The requires_version decorator is used internally to guard methods:

from solr.core import requires_version

class Solr:

    @requires_version(4, 0)
    def atomic_update(self, doc):
        ...

If self.server_version is lower than the specified minimum, the decorator raises SolrVersionError before the method body executes.

Supported Solr versions

solrpy targets all Solr versions from 1.2 through 10.x. The version detection mechanism ensures that features are only used when the connected Solr instance supports them.

Feature	Minimum Solr
Basic query and indexing	1.2
Grouping (resp.grouped)	3.3
Atomic Update (atomic_update)	4.0
Soft Commit (commit(soft_commit=True))	4.0
Real-time Get (get())	4.0
MoreLikeThis (mlt)	4.0
Schema API (conn.schema)	4.2
Cursor Pagination (cursor_next(), iter_cursor())	4.7
JSON Facet API (json_facet parameter)	5.0
Dense Vector Search (KNN(conn))	9.0
KNN efSearchScaleFactor	10.0