Solr 5: First look

Installation

Setting up Solr5

Solr 5 is now a stand-alone service and it is no longer necessary to run it in a container like Tomcat. The advantage of this is that Tomcat does not have to be installed any longer, which simplifies maintaining and securing the server Solr is running on.

Installation is also much simpler:

Download Solr from the download page
Extract the archive (e.g. to solr5)
CD into the directory (e.g. cd solr5)
In this directory there is a script: install_solr_service.sh which must be run as root and must have as first argument the path to the downloaded archive. Run this script with:sudo ./bin/install_solr_service.sh <path-to-solr-5.0.0.tgz\>

Installation defaults / options:

The installation directory defaults to /opt/solr, and is configurable with the '-i'-option
The data directory defaults to /var/solr, and is configurable with the '-d'-option.
The port defaults to 8983 (configuration option '-p')

Notes:

The script wil install Solr5 as a service, so that you can easily use sudo service solr start, sudo service solr stop etc.
The script also creates a 'solr'-user and -group which are used to run the server.

Tweaking the installation

In the data-directory (default /var/solr) the file solr.in.sh lives. This script will be run as part of the Solr startup procedure and is the place in which the most important variables for Solr are set.

For example, debugging and development handy options for autocommit can be set here ('Why do I have to wait 2 minutes befor something is in the index...'):

SOLR_OPTS="$SOLR_OPTS -Dsolr.autoSoftCommit.maxTime=3000"

SOLR_OPTS="$SOLR_OPTS -Dsolr.autoCommit.maxTime=60000"

The directory in which the new create core command acts can also be set here by editing the SOLR_HOME variable, eg:

SOLR_HOME=/var/solr/cores

To use this, make sure the solr.xml is present in the directory, also make sure the solr user owns this directory, and the service is restarted:

sudo chown -R solr:solr /var/solr

sudo cp <solr install dir>/server/solr/solr.xml /var/solr/cores/

sudo service solr restart

Creating cores

The solr executable in the bin directory has the ability to create cores, so copying existing cores and adding them to solr.xml is not necessary anymore. Furthermore, Solr 5 uses the new core-discovery abilities to detect the cores and so these kind of settings:

</cores>

in solr.xml are no longer present.

To create a new core (from the Solr 5 installation dir) use:

sudo bin/solr create -c devel1

This command will fail with an error:

Failed to create core 'devel1' due to: Error CREATEing SolrCore 'devel1': Unable to create core [devel1] Caused by: /var/solr/data/devel1/data

due to permmission errors, fix them with:

sudo chown -R solr:solr /var/solr/

and rerun the commando:

sudo bin/solr create -c devel1

If you now point your browser to

http://localhost:8983/solr/#/devel1

you will see the new core.

Customizing your schema

Drupal schema

When using the 4.x schema from the Drupal ApacheSolr module only a few points prevent the Solr core from running:

Line 99:

Line 122:

Both 'FloatField' and 'DateField' are deprecated:

The following legacy numeric and date field types, deprecated in Solr 4.8, are no longer supported: BCDIntField, BCDLongField, BCDStrField, IntField, LongField, FloatField, DoubleField, SortableIntField, SortableLongField, SortableFloatField, SortableDoubleField, and DateField. Convert these types in your schema to the corresponding Trie-based field type and then re-index. See SOLR-5936 for more information.