Getting Started

What Lucille is, how it works, and how to run your first pipeline.

Lucille is a production-grade Search ETL framework for loading data into Lucene-based search engines — Apache Solr, Elasticsearch, and OpenSearch — and vector databases such as Pinecone and Weaviate. It supports batch, incremental, and streaming ingestion with inline document enrichment, and runs as a single JAR with no persistent server to manage. Lucille is Java-based and open-source, developed and maintained by KMW Technology.

How Lucille Works

A Connector retrieves data from a source system and publishes it as Lucille Documents.
Workers route each Document through a configurable enrichment Pipeline built from composable Stages.
An Indexer sends the processed Documents to the search backend.
These three components communicate through a messaging layer — either in-memory queues (local mode, single JVM) or Apache Kafka (distributed mode, multiple JVMs at scale).
Document lifecycle events — publication, processing, indexing, failure, and drops — are tracked so Lucille knows when a run is complete and can report exact success and failure counts.

For a deeper look at the architecture, see Architecture Overview.