By Kelvin Li in java —

Steps to integrate Solr into Tomcat

Recently I am using the Solr as the full text search enginee in the project. The project is django based, an amaz
ing framework HayStack was imported as the django search modular. It provides some
useful APIs and Commonds that are quite handy.

For Solr, by default it can be ran java -jar start.jar in Solr dir, but in need of the project, we need to host the Solr by Tomcat.
I record some important steps here:

The example Solr version is 3.6

Install Solr instance(s)

  1. Extact the apache-solr-3.6.0.zip.

  2. Copy the apache-solr-3.6.0/example/solr directory to the installation directory /Users/Kelvin/Services/SolrSearchEngines/solr1.

  3. Copy dist/apache-solr-*.war into /Users/Kelvin/Services/SolrSearchEngines/solr as solr.war.

  4. Open /Users/Kelvin/Services/SolrSearchEngines/conf/solrconfig.xml
    Specify the full path of dataDir for the index data:

<dataDir>${solr.data.dir:/Users/Kelvin/Services/SolrSearchEngines/solr1/data}</dataDir>

Generate Solr schema file with Haystack module in Django

  1. Install the hayStack in your Django application.
  2. run the command to generate the schema file:
python manage.py build_solr_schema > schema.xml

Replace the existed schema in the Solr's example

mv /Users/Kelvin/Services/SolrSearchEngines/solr1/conf/schema.xml /Users/Kelvin/Services/SolrSearchEngines/solr1/conf/schema.xml.origin

cp schema.xml /Users/Kelvin/Services/SolrSearchEngines/solr1/conf

cd /Users/Kelvin/Services/SolrSearchEngines/solr1/conf

cp stopwords.txt stopwords_en.txt

Create solr1.xml file

Go in tomcat-installer-dir/conf/Catalina/localhost create a xml file call solr1.xml with the content:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<Context docbase="/Users/Kelvin/Services/solr.war" debug="0" crosscontext="true">
  <Environment name="solr/home" type="java.lang.String" value="/Users/Kelvin/Services/SolrSearchE\
ngines/solr1" override="true" />
</Context>

Deploy the solr admin site

Put the solr.war to tomcat-installer-dir/webapp, once the tomcat startup, it will extract to a folder call solr, rename it to solr1

Have multiple instances and have a try

Repeat the above steps with different installation directories to run multiple instances of Solr side-by-side.

If Tomcat is not already running, start it with service tomcat6 start or $CATALINA_HOME/bin/startup.sh run.

The Solr admin should be available at http://localhost:8080/solr1.

Done