Why an account is required

Loghound does not merely read and write its two indexes. It owns them — and that single fact is the whole reason there is no bring-your-own-Solr path.

What you need

1. Create an Opensolr account. The free plan never expires and needs no credit card. See the plans.
2. Take your account email and API key from Account › API Keys in the Opensolr control panel. Setup asks for both and does the rest itself.
3. Make sure the plan has room for two more indexes. Setup checks before it creates anything: The plan index limit. Already running Loghound elsewhere? Join the pair you have, which creates nothing.

Across the life of an installation, Loghound does all of this to its two indexes:

• Creates them, with names it generates, in a region you pick from the list the platform returns.
• Uploads their configsets — schema first, then solrconfig.xml, because reversed the index reloads against a config referring to field types the old schema does not define and the reload fails.
• Reloads both indexes and queries each one to prove it can reach and authenticate to them.
• Checks their shape against this release, field by field, whenever it joins a pair rather than creating one.
• Reports and trims them against your plan, which is what makes retention scale with the plan instead of being cut off by it.

On a Solr you administer yourself it has no route to create an index or install a configset, and no way to keep the schema right. The option existed once and was removed for exactly that reason: it promised something the product cannot deliver.

Loghound is self-hosted software. There is no Loghound company, no telemetry and no vendor with a copy of your traffic. But the claim “nothing leaves the box” was only ever true on the path that was removed, and this documentation will not repeat it.

So your log-derived data leaves your machine for infrastructure Opensolr runs. That is a processor relationship and you should treat it as one in your records. What you keep full control of is what is written: the address mode decides whether an address is stored at all, and every enrichment lookup is a switch. Privacy is the page for that.

An installation made before the option was removed still has solr.mode => 'custom' in its configuration. It is refused, loudly and on purpose: the tail, score and retention commands all validate at startup and refuse to start, printing what changed, why, and what to do; the panel’s settings page says the same at the top of the Solr card.

To move, set solr.mode to 'opensolr' and run the wizard, which provisions the two indexes on your account:

sudo -u loghound php /opt/loghound/bin/loghound-setup