NOTE: You need to have

1. Access to install solr server
2. Admin access to Moodle test site.

Prerequisite

1. Follow only 'Installation' section in https://docs.moodle.org/31/en/Global_search#How_to_install_Solr (replace 31 by the current version)
2. Login as admin
3. Go to Site administration > Plugins > Search -> Manage global search
4. Enable search should be disabled by default
5. Open a new tab and go to your dashboard, press 'Customise this page' and add a global search block
6. You should be able to add the block and you should see the following message inside of it 'Global searching is not enabled.'
7. Leave this tab open, return to Manage global search and "Enable global search"
8. Return to your dashboard, now you should see a search form.
9. Type something and press search
10. You should be redirected to search/index.php and you should see 'No results'
11. You should also see filter by area and time.
12. Close this tab and return to the previous one
13. Go to site admin -> plugins -> search -> solr and save changes (basically set host to localhost, port to the default 8983 and indexname to what you have in solr core)

Indexing & searching

1. Go to Site administration -> reports -> Global search info
2. Use tool_generator to generate a few courses with forums if your site don't have much data (we will need forum posts)
3. Tick recreate index and save changes. I hope you don't have many many forum_posts this will send them to the search engine, may take a bit of time if you have thousands and thousands posts, take a break, you deserve it
4. At some point this will finish and will show a 'Indexing finished' and the screen last run numbers will be updated with some numbers
5. Open your dashboard in a new tab and use the global search block to search something you know that your forum post contain, for example 'forum'
6. You should see the list of results including that search string
7. Click all links in one of these results, they should all be valid results
8. When you have more than 10 results you will see pagination links, try that these pagination links work
9. Search something else with valid results and check that you can see results
10. Search something else with a crazy query string like dfsghuasdguhisdfgui and check that you can not see results
11. If will be nice if you can look at the query field help and try some combinations