In this tutorial, you will learn how to re-index your Sitecore search indexes. TO improve website performance, Sitecore uses search indexes. These search indexes are queried whenever content is needed to be retrieved from your frontend Sitecore powered website. Querying an index is much quicker than querying against the database. Out-of-the-box, Sitecore uses an off-the-shelf search provider, called Lucene. Lucene is a well-established search provider and is used by the majority of the CMS solutions on the market today.
Lucene indexes are stored as physical files on your server. Its these physically index files that Lucene uses to perform queries against your data. Every time an item is created within Sitecore these indexes are updated. In some situations, the index may fail to update for whatever reason. When this happens the index might not contain some data that you expect it to. If an index is missing data, people will usually report your search results are missing the latest content. If you find your search is missing certain information, then this is the article for you 🔥🔥🔥
Lucene Index
By default, the Lucene files are created within your Sitecore websites webroot within the Data folder. Within this folder you should see a folder called Index:
It is possible to use a third-party tool called Luke For Lucene to manually query these index files. Luke, can be handy when debugging why content is missing within your search.
Re-build the Lucene Index
To re-build/clear the Index, the best option is to re-build the index within Sitecore. If you manually tried to delete the index files off of the server you might see strange errors within Sitecore so I do not recommend this path. To re-build your Sitecore instance, log into your Sitecore shell/dashboard by going to:
www.website.com/sitecore/shell/
The screen should look like this:
Select Control Panel:
Select Indexing:
Select Indexing Manager:
Here you will see a list of all the indexes. Select the ones you care about and click on the Build button at the bottom of the dialogue box. Your index will now be rebuilt and the missing data should now appear💥
When you search your site, you should now see all your latest content. Happy Coding 🤘
