'My application won't start after "Checking index availability..."'

Some applications with an older version of the websolr-sunspot_rails or websolr-acts_as_solr gems will see a message "Checking index availability..." when their application starts.

This output was for a feature which we no longer support, in which we would dynamically reconfigure an index to use a different configuration if your application switched to a different Solr client. This feature was phased out because it was rarely utilized, and because older versions of these client shims implemented their check with less than graceful error checking, causing exceptions during application boot if websolr.com was experiencing some kind of error.

If your app sees the message "Checking index availability...", we recommend you upgrade your Solr client. More recent versions of both websolr-acts_as_solr and websolr-sunspot_rails have removed this check entirely. The websolr-sunspot_rails gem itself has been deprecated in favor of using sunspot_rails directly.