CheapSkate is a Solr emulator intended for situations where the basic functionality of Solr is needed or desired but a Java application server is not feasible (i.e. a cheap, shared webhosting account). It uses Ferret (a Ruby Lucene clone) for the fulltext indexing and faceting.

CheapSkate is very much a work in progress and development is based on responding to specific needs, rather than really trying to build an actual Solr clone (hence the current lack of XML responseWriter, for example).

Requirements:

sinatra
ferret
hpricot
uuid
json
faster_csv

Caveats:

CheapSkate isn’t really intended to replace Solr. If you need something that scales to millions of documents or performs replication or does all the neat things Solr does, use Solr.

Faceting causes a serious performance hit on large result sets due to the fact that the facet results require every document in the index to be loaded.

Todos:

Provide field boosting and analyzers both during index as well as query.

Add the MoreLikeThis analyzer from acts_as_ferret.

Add more responseWriters (starting with XML).