Installing and Running Solr 1.4 on Windows / Tomcat

Installing and Running Solr 1.4 on your local machine for testing is as easy as pie.

Here I am going cover the steps needed to get Solr running on Tomcat 6.0 on a Windows machine. In our production environment we run Solr on Ubuntu 9.10 Server Edition in Tomcat as the servlet container, but that’s a story for another day.

(1) What is Solr
Solr is an enterprise search server based in the open source community. Out of the box it offers features such as a convenient HTTP/XML interface, keyword search highlighting, faceted navigation (like categories), spell correction, auto-suggest queries and an admin interface to manage your index. Under the hood, Solr relies on Apaches’ Lucene text search engine library. Lucene is “the bomb”, but Solr is definitely the delivery mechanism.

Let’s say for instance you had a database with millions of records properly normalized as a good database should be. Searching such a behemoth could be challenging, not to mention taxing on the server itself. Databases were “made to query”, but sometimes we have to weigh up the cost of performance implications in running ad hoc queries against a transactional database searching and joining multiple tables. Searching a pharmaceutical database for let’s say the word “headache” would yield thousands of records – everything from symptoms to side effects etc.

Indexing such data to a dedicated search repository would be ideal. The data is actually updated very infrequently as opposed to it being queried thousands of times a day by users. This would ease the load on your database and provide a better user experience to the end user. we are trying to create solutions, not create more headaches.

(2) Installing Tomcat
Go to http://tomcat.apache.org/ and download Tomcat 6.x, choose the Windows Service Installer under “Binary Distributions”. If you already have Tomcat installed, good for you. Apache rules.

Double click the downloaded file and follow the installation instructions. Normally Tomcat would install by default on port 8080. Once the installation is complete, open a new browser window, and go to http://127.0.0.1:8080/

Tomcat should be running screaming fast as always. Ok, now stop it by finding the little “Play” button with a feather in the taskbar. Right click it and select “Stop Service”.

(3) Deploying Solr 1.4
Go to: http://lucene.apache.org/solr/ and find the download link for Solr 1.4. Download the apache-solr-1.4.0.zip file, and unzip it to any location on your system. In the “apache-solr-1.4.0/dist” folder, make a copy of the “apache-solr-1.4.0.war” file and rename it to “solr.zip”. Unzip it in the current location.

(3.1) Setting “solr/home”
Open the web.xml file in Notepad located in the Solr/WEB-INF folder. At the top of the file, find the <env-entry> section. It should be commented out by default. Make a copy of it, and move it to the bottom of the file:

<env-entry>
<env-entry-name>solr/home</env-entry-name>
<env-entry-value>C:\solr</env-entry-value>
<env-entry-type>java.lang.String</env-entry-type>
</env-entry>

Set the <env-entry-value> to C:\solr and close the file. Your solr/home is now now set.

Move back to the root of the solr folder, and select all the files and folders e.g. admin, META-INF, WEB-INF, favicon.ico and index.jsp – and zip them back into a file calles solr.zip. Rename this file to solr.war.

Copy the solr.war file to Tomcats’ “webapps” directory.

Again, from the “apache-solr-1.4.0/example” folder, copy the “solr” folder as a template for your solr home. Past it into you c:\ drive e.g. C:\solr.

At this point, Tomcat is still stopped, now Start it again. This will cause the servlet container (Tomcat) to deploy the .war file as a web application within Tomcat, pointing to C:\solr as the solr/home.

Open a new browser window and go to: http://127.0.0.1:8080/solr. If everything went as planned, you’ll get the “Welcome to Solr!” page, with a hyperlink just below it “Solr Admin”.

If not, inspect Tomcats’ log files under Tomcat 6.0/logs/catalina.2010-01-19.log. The datepart should be the current date.log. Scroll to the bottom of the file and read the SEVERE messages carefully. Usually the solr/home isn’t properly set or the JAVA_HOME is missing, but you should have picked this up if  Tomcat never started successfully.

Congratulations, solr is running. Click the “Solr Admin” link to go to the Admin interface. Probably the most important thing here is the [SCHEMA BROWSER] link. The FIELDS section is what you current index schema looks like.

Be sure to check out http://wiki.apache.org/solr/FrontPage

The Solr wiki has excellent examples to help you along.

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