Setting up Shinydocs Enterprise Search for Intranet Access

Prerequisites 

Before configuring Shinydocs Pro’s Enterprise Search to be accessible to the rest of your organization, you must set up Kerberos authentication using the instructions here.  This must be done so that Search will only show results that are accessible to the user performing the search. 

Setup 

Configure Enterprise Search to allow connections outside of localhost 

In order for Enterprise Search to be accessible outside localhost, it must be configured to bind to “*”: 

• Edit this configuration file in a text editor:
  [Install Location]\Shinydocs Pro\Search\appsettings.Production.json 

• change line 5 from:
            "Url": "https://localhost:9702",
  to:
            "Url": "https://*:9702", 

• Save the file 

• Restart the Shinydocs Search service 

You will now be able to connect to the search page from anywhere within the network using the host's IP address or hostname, on port 9702. For example: https://hostname:9702 

You must use an https connection. The Search page will not respond on http://hostname:9702. 

Your browser may show a warning that the site is not safe. This is because the Enterprise Search site uses a self-signed certificate, and the certificate will not be trusted by your computer or browser by default. 

If you wish to use a different address for the Search site, you are free to set that up yourself, e.g. using DNS. 

Configure Enterprise Search to use a different TLS/SSL certificate 

Instead of using the default self-signed certificate, you can create your own certificate for the Search server, using whatever means you normally use to secure your own servers. Once the certificate has been created, you must configure Search to use this certificate. 

To configure Search to use for your custom certificate: 

• Edit the configuration file:
  [Install Location]\Shinydocs Pro\Search\appsettings.Production.json 

• Change line 7 from:
            "Subject": "localhost.localdomain",
  to:
            "Subject": "<certificate issued to>",
  Where <certificate issued to> is replaced with the “issued to” property from your certificate. 

• Save the file 

• Restart the Shinydocs Search service 

Search will now use your internal custom certificate, and your users should not see warnings that the site is not safe.