How to Index PDF and Word Docs in Drupal with Search API and Solr

Staff Reporter

Ivan Zugec’s latest tutorial on WebWash demonstrates how to make PDF and Word documents searchable in Drupal by integrating Search API Attachments with Apache Solr. The guide begins with setting up media thumbnails and configuring Drupal’s private file system to properly manage file access and indexing.

The walkthrough covers deploying Solr via DDEV, uploading the required configuration sets, and connecting the Drupal site to a functional Solr server. It then shows how to enable the Search API Attachments module to extract content from uploaded files. For the frontend, the guide builds a View with exposed filters, relevance-based sorting, and faceted search using the Facets and Better Exposed Filters modules. The result is a fully functional document search feature suitable for content-heavy Drupal websites.

Reference: Indexing PDF Docs using Search API and Solr in Drupal by Ivan Zugec, WebWash (30 December 2025)

Drupal

Search API

Solr

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