Running Solr

To test whether your installation was completed successfully, you need to run Solr. Type these commands in the terminal to run it:

$ cd /usr/local/Cellar/solr/4.4.0/libexec/example/
$ java -jar start.jar

After you run the preceding commands, you will see lots of dumping messages/logs on the terminal. Don't worry! It's normal. Just try to fix any error if it is there. Once the messages are stopped and there is no error message, simply go to any web browser and type http://localhost:8983/solr/#/.

Tip

Downloading the example code

You can download the example code files from your account at http://www.packtpub.com for all the Packt Publishing books you have purchased. If you purchased this book elsewhere, you can visit http://www.packtpub.com/support and register to have the files e-mailed directly to you.

You will see following screen on your browser:

Fresh Solr do not contain any data. In Solr terminology, data is termed as a document. You will learn how to index data in Solr in upcoming chapters.

Installing Solr in Windows

There are multiple ways of installing Solr on a Windows machine. Here, I have explained the way to set up Solr with Jetty running as a service via NSSM:

1. Install the latest Java JDK from http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/downloads/index.html.
2. Download the latest Solr release (ZIP version) from http://www.apache.org/dyn/closer.cgi/lucene/solr/. At the time of writing this book, the latest Solr release was 4.10.1.
3. Unzip the Solr download. You should have files as shown in the following screenshot. Open the example folder.
   
4. Copy the etc, lib, logs, solr, and webapps folders and start.jar to C:\solr (you will need to create the folder at C:\solr), as shown in the following screenshot:
   
5. Now open the C:\solr\solr folder and copy the contents back to the root C:\solr folder. When you are done, you can delete the C:\solr\solr folder. See the following image, the selected folder you can delete now:
   

   At this point, your C:\solr directory should look like what is shown in the following screenshot:

   
6. Solr can be run at this point if you start it from the command line. Change your directory to C:\solr and then run java -Dsolr.solr.home=C:/solr/ -jar start.jar.
7. If you go to http://localhost:8983/solr/, you should see the Solr dashboard.
8. Now Solr is up and running, so we can work on getting Jetty to run as a Windows service. Since Jetty comes bundled with Solr, all that we need to do is run it as a service. There are several options to do this, but the one I prefer is through Non-Sucking Service Manager (NSSM)program in windows which is the, the most compatible service manager across Windows environment. NSSM can be downloaded from http://nssm.cc/download.
9. Once you have downloaded NSSM, open the win32 or win64 folder as appropriate and copy nssm.exe to your C:\solr folder.
10. Open Command Prompt, change the directory to C:\solr, and then run nssm install Solr.
11. A dialog will open. Select java.exe as the application located at C:\Windows\System32\.
12. In the options input box, enter: Dsolr.solr.home=C:/solr/ -Djetty.home=C:/solr/ -Djetty.logs=C:/solr/logs/ -cp C:/solr/lib/*.jar;C:/solr/start.jar -jar C:/solr/start.jar.
13. Click on Install service. You should get a service successfully installed message.
14. Finally run net start Solr.
15. Jetty should now be running as a service. Check this by going to http://localhost:/8983/solr/.

Installing Solr on Linux

To install Solr on Linux/Unix, you will need Java Runtime Environment (JRE) version 1.7 or higher. Then follow these steps:

1. Download the latest Solr release (.tgz) from http://www.apache.org/dyn/closer.cgi/lucene/solr/. At the time of writing this book, the latest release was 4.10.1.
2. Unpack the file to your desired location.
3. Solr runs inside a Java servlet container, such as Tomcat, Jetty, and so on. Solr distribution includes a working demo server in the example directory, which runs in Jetty. You can use Jetty servlet container, or use your preferred servlet container. If you are using a servlet container other than Jetty and it's already running, then stop that server.
4. Copy the solr-4.10.1.war file from the Solr distribution under the dist directory to the webapps directory of your servlet container. Change the name of this file; it must be named solr.war.
5. Copy the Solr home directory, solr-4.x.0/example/solr/, from the distribution to your desired Solr home location.
6. Start your servlet container, passing to it the location of your Solr home in one of these ways:
   1. Set the solr.solr.home Java system property to your Solr home (for example, using this example jetty setup: java -Dsolr.solr.home=/some/dir -jar start.jar).
   2. Configure the servlet container so that a JNDI lookup of java:comp/env/solr/home by the Solr web app will point to your Solr Home.
   3. Start the servlet container in the directory containing ./solr. The default Solr Home is solr under the JVM's current working directory ($CWD/solr).
7. To confirm the installation, just go to http://localhost:/8983/solr/ and you will see the Solr dashboard. Now your Solr is up and running.

Thus, by the end of the installation, your Solr is up and running. But since we have not fed any data into Solr, it will not index any data. Let's try to insert some example data into our server.

The Solr download comes with example data bundled in it. We can use the same data for indexing as an example. Go to the exampledocs directory under the example directory. Here, you will see a lot of files. Now go to the command line (terminal) and type the following commands:

$ cd $SOLR_HOME/example/exampledocs/
$ ./post.sh vidcard.xml

Within the post.sh file, the script will call http://localhost:8983/solr/update using curl to post xml data from the vidcard.xml file. When the import completes (without any error), you will see a message that looks something like this:

Now let's try to check out our imported data from web browser. Try http://localhost:8983/solr/select?q=*:*&wt=json to fetch all of the data in your Solr instance, like this:

When you see the preceding data, it means that your Solr server is running properly and is ready to index your desired feed. You will be reading indexing in depth in upcoming chapters.