Did you know – Paas does not support Lucene

So psyched to share this quick piece of info, this is my first time working with a fully Sitecore Paas infrastructure, so, getting to know it more intimately.  I did know that Sitecore Paas comes with Azure Search and Redis cache for instance, but, what I did not know is that Lucene is not at all supported which means that all Lucene related config files were actually disabled on the upper environments that were set up with help from Sitecore.

Reality hit me hard when trying to set up a computed index field that worked beautifully fine on my local, but, completely broke on upper environments.

So, folks out there if you are using Paas pay attention to the index configuration and ensure all the steps listed below were actually completed thoroughly on your Paas  sitecore servers.

https://doc.sitecore.net/sitecore_experience_platform/setting_up_and_maintaining/search_and_indexing/configure_azure_search

Two quick follow up questions that would come to mind, how do I know which type of Search Indexes are used, this is the simple one, look at showconfig.aspx to see what is listed under Index configuration which defines type of Index.

The second one which is more important when there is custom search/Index based functionality is, how to ensure locally too Developers are using Azure based Indexes and not Lucene based one’s?  Would love to hear from every one who has experience on this.  This would be an open question for now, hoping to resolve this based on feedback and would potentially reach out to Sitecore to understand what do people generally do for Development in this case.

Happy Sitecoring and hope you are all enjoying your holidays!