Java, Linux

Installing Solr 3.5 under Tomcat 7

Solr is a open source Enterprise Search Engine. It can be deployed as war file in servlet containers like tomcat or jetty.

This short howto show you run solr with the current Tomcat 7 version:

  1. Download Solr as Zip
  2. Unzip it e.g. in /usr/share/ with folder structure
    1. mv apache-solr-3.5.0.zip /usr/share
    2. cd /usr/share
    3. unzip apache-solr-3.5.0.zip
    4. result is a folder /usr/share/apache-solr-3.5.0
  3. Create a new folder e.g /usr/share/solr as base folder for the configuration
    1. cp -a /usr/share/apache-solr-3.5.0/example/solr /usr/share/solr
    2. cp /usr/share/apache-solr-3.5.0/dist/*.war /usr/share/solr
    3. ln -s /usr/share/solr/apache-solr-3.5.0.war /usr/share/solr.war
    4. mkdir /usr/share/solr/data< for index data/li>
    5. mkdir /usr/share/solr/lib for additional jars
    6. cp /usr/share/apache-solr-3.5.0/dist/apache-solr-velocity-3.5.0.jar /usr/share/solr/lib
    7. cp -a /usr/share/apache-solr-3.5.0/contrib/ /usr/share/solr/
    8. nano /usr/share/solr/conf/solrconfig.xml and change the lib settings
    // ...
    1. chown -R tomcat:tomcat /usr/share/solr if tomcat server runs as user tomcat
  4. Add URIEncoding to tomcat connector settings
    1. nano /usr/share/tomcat7/conf/server.xml
    2. search for the connector on port 8080
    3. add the URIEncoding like this:
  5. Create a tomcat configuration file for solr (CATALINA_HOME is /usr/share/tomcat7)
    1. cd /usr/share/tomcat7/conf
    2. mkdir Catalina (if not exists)
    3. cd Catalina
    4. mkdir localhost (if not exists)
    5. cd localhost
    6. nano solr.xml
  6. Paste the following configuration and save the file
  1. Set properties for tomcat and solr inside /usr/share/tomcat7/bin/setenv.sh
  2. Paste the following configuration and save the file
export JAVA_OPTS="$JAVA_OPTS -Dsolr.solr.home=/usr/share/solr"
export JAVA_OPTS="$JAVA_OPTS -Dsolr.data.dir=/usr/share/solr/data"
export JAVA_OPTS="$JAVA_OPTS -Dsolr.velocity.enabled=true"
export JAVA_HOME="/usr/lib/jvm/default-java"
  1. (Re)start tomcat
    1. /etc/init.d/tomcat7 restart
  2. Open browser and go to http://YOUR_SERVER_HOSTNAME:8080/solr/admin/ assuming that tomcat runs under default port 8080

I use the provided sample xml files to see if import and query functionality works:

  1. cd /usr/share/apache-solr-3.5.0/example/exampledocs
  2. nano post.sh
  3. change the URL parameter to your environment e.g. to URL=http://localhost:8080/solr/update
  4. ./post.sh *.xml
  5. Open the admin ui under http://YOUR_SERVER_HOSTNAME:8080/solr/admin/
  6. click the search button

see my follow up post for Configuring solr, tomcat 7 with mod_jk and apache 2.2