This feature was added in VuFind 8.0.

Tabular data is commonly distributed as “comma-separated values” (CSV) files, and any spreadsheet-style data can be easily converted to the CSV format. While the CSV format is somewhat limited (particularly if you are dealing with multi-valued fields), it is commonly used, and may be a useful source of input for your VuFind index. Fortunately, a tool exists to load CSV files directly into VuFind's Solr instance.

Loading CSV files can be done with a two-step process:

Create a configuration file in the “import” subdirectory of your local settings directory. You can use any filename that you like – it usually makes sense to have a separate configuration file for each CSV file you load, since content and formatting is likely to be unique to each file. You can find an example in $VUFIND_HOME/import/csv.ini. This documents all of the available settings. You should make a local copy of this example and then configure the desired settings.

Run the command line tool like this:

php $VUFIND_HOME/public/index.php import/import-csv /path/to/input_file.csv name_of_config.ini

In the above example, note that /path/to/input_file.csv is the full path to the input CSV file, whereas name_of_config.ini is simply the name of the configuration file you created without any path specified – VuFind will search for it automatically in your $VUFIND_LOCAL_DIR/import directory.

The ingest tool also supports some optional switches, including a –test-only mode which will display the result of the ingest on the console instead of sending it to Solr (useful for testing/debugging), and an –index switch you can use to load data into non-standard Solr cores. For full details, you can run:

php $VUFIND_HOME/public/index.php import/import-csv --help