Solr in 5 minutes
Solr makes it easy to run a full-featured search server. In fact, its so easy, I'm going to show you how in 5 minutes!
Installing Solr
For the purposes of this tutorial, I'll assume you're on a Linux or Mac environment.
You should also have JDK 8 or above installed.
wget http://apache.cs.utah.edu/lucene/solr/7.3.1/solr-7.3.1.tgz
tar -zxvf solr-7.3.1.tgz
cd solr-7.3.1
Starting Solr
Solr comes with an example directory which contains some sample files we can use. The available examples are:
cloud : SolrCloud example
dih : Data Import Handler (rdbms, mail, rss, tika)
schemaless : Schema-less example (schema is inferred from data during indexing)
techproducts : Kitchen sink example providing comprehensive examples of Solr features
To run Solr with one of these examples, use bin/solr -e [EXAMPLE] where [EXAMPLE] is one of above. e.g. bin/solr -e dih. Let's run the techproducts example.
bin/solr -e techproducts
You should see something like this in the terminal.
Creating Solr home directory /tmp/solrt/solr-7.3.1/example/techproducts/solr
Starting up Solr on port 8983 using command:
bin/solr start -p 8983 -s "example/techproducts/solr"
Waiting up to 30 seconds to see Solr running on port 8983 [/]
Started Solr server on port 8983 (pid=12281). Happy searching!
Setup new core instance directory:
/tmp/solrt/solr-7.3.1/example/techproducts/solr/techproducts
Creating new core 'techproducts' using command:
http://localhost:8983/solr/admin/cores?action=CREATE&name=techproducts&instanceDir=techproducts
{
"responseHeader":{
"status":0,
"QTime":2060},
"core":"techproducts"}
Indexing tech product example docs from /tmp/solrt/solr-7.3.1/example/exampledocs
SimplePostTool version 5.0.0
Posting files to [base] url http://localhost:8983/solr/techproducts/update using content-type application/xml...
POSTing file money.xml to [base]
POSTing file manufacturers.xml to [base]
POSTing file hd.xml to [base]
POSTing file sd500.xml to [base]
POSTing file solr.xml to [base]
POSTing file utf8-example.xml to [base]
POSTing file mp500.xml to [base]
POSTing file monitor2.xml to [base]
POSTing file vidcard.xml to [base]
POSTing file ipod_video.xml to [base]
POSTing file monitor.xml to [base]
POSTing file mem.xml to [base]
POSTing file ipod_other.xml to [base]
POSTing file gb18030-example.xml to [base]
14 files indexed.
COMMITting Solr index changes to http://localhost:8983/solr/techproducts/update...
Time spent: 0:00:00.491
Solr techproducts example launched successfully. Direct your Web browser to http://localhost:8983/solr to visit the Solr Admin UI
To verify that Solr is running, you can do this:
bin/solr status
Which should produce something like this:
Found 1 Solr nodes:
Solr process 12281 running on port 8983
{
"solr_home":"/tmp/solrt/solr-7.3.1/example/techproducts/solr/",
"version":"7.3.1 1696229 - noble - 2015-08-17 17:10:43",
"startTime":"2015-09-14T22:41:56.876Z",
"uptime":"0 days, 0 hours, 1 minutes, 7 seconds",
"memory":"32.7 MB (%6.7) of 490.7 MB"}
Solr is now running! You can now access the Solr Admin webapp by loading http://localhost:8983/solr/ in your web browser.
Indexing Data
The startup script already added some sample data to our Solr instance, but we're going to re-add some docs just to see how it all works.
The example/exampledocs folder contains some XML files we can use.
A quick glance at one of the XML files reveals that each Solr document consists of multiple fields. Each field has a name and a value. For example:
<add><doc>
<field name="id">9885A004</field>
<field name="name">Canon PowerShot SD500</field>
<field name="manu">Canon Inc.</field>
...
<field name="inStock">true</field>
</doc></add>
The post.jar in the same folder provides a convenient way to add files to Solr.
cd example/exampledocs
java -Dc=techproducts -jar post.jar sd500.xml
That produces:
SimplePostTool version 5.0.0
Posting files to [base] url http://localhost:8983/solr/techproducts/update using content-type application/xml...
POSTing file sd500.xml to [base]
1 files indexed.
COMMITting Solr index changes to http://localhost:8983/solr/techproducts/update...
Time spent: 0:00:00.186
This response tells us that the POST operation was successful.
Note that there are 2 main ways of adding data to Solr:
- HTTP
- Native client
We'll explore these in greater detail in a subsequent tutorial.
Searching
Let's see if we can retrieve the document we just added.
Since Solr accepts HTTP requests, you can use your web browser to communicate with Solr: http://localhost:8983/solr/techproducts/select?q=sd500&wt=json
This returns the following JSON result:
{
"responseHeader": {
"status": 0,
"QTime": 3,
"params": {
"q": "sd500",
"wt": "json"
}
},
"response": {
"numFound": 1,
"start": 0,
"docs": [
{
"id": "9885A004",
"name": "Canon PowerShot SD500",
"manu": "Canon Inc.",
"manu_id_s": "canon",
"cat": [
"electronics",
"camera"
],
"features": [
"3x zoop, 7.1 megapixel Digital ELPH",
"movie clips up to 640x480 @30 fps",
"2.0\" TFT LCD, 118,000 pixels",
"built in flash, red-eye reduction"
],
"includes": "32MB SD card, USB cable, AV cable, battery",
"weight": 6.4,
"price": 329.95,
"price_c": "329.95,USD",
"popularity": 7,
"inStock": true,
"manufacturedate_dt": "2006-02-13T15:26:37Z",
"store": "45.19614,-93.90341",
"_version_": 1512330534874775600
}
]
}
}
Nice! A quick verification with sd500.xml should confirm that all is in order.
Let's now do some real searching.
Here's a demonstration of retrieving the name and id of all documents with inStock = false: http://localhost:8983/solr/techproducts/select?q=inStock:false&wt=json&fl=id,name
{
"responseHeader": {
"status": 0,
"QTime": 3,
"params": {
"fl": "id,name",
"q": "inStock:false",
"wt": "json"
}
},
"response": {
"numFound": 4,
"start": 0,
"docs": [
{
"id": "EN7800GTX/2DHTV/256M",
"name": "ASUS Extreme N7800GTX/2DHTV (256 MB)"
},
{
"id": "100-435805",
"name": "ATI Radeon X1900 XTX 512 MB PCIE Video Card"
},
{
"id": "F8V7067-APL-KIT",
"name": "Belkin Mobile Power Cord for iPod w/ Dock"
},
{
"id": "IW-02",
"name": "iPod & iPod Mini USB 2.0 Cable"
}
]
}
}
You'll learn more about the various URL query parameters in a separate tutorial.
Shutdown
To shutdown Solr, use bin/solr stop. This will shutdown Solr cleanly.
Solr is fairly robust, so even in situations of OS or disk crashes, it is unlikely that Solr's index will become corrupted.
Where to from here?
- Check out one of the books about Solr below.
Popular books related to Solr and search
