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
Starting Solr
Indexing Data
Searching
Shutdown

Installing Solr

For the purposes of this tutorial, I'll assume you're on a Linux or Mac environment.

You should also have JDK 5 or above installed.

wget http://download.nextag.com/apache//lucene/solr/3.4.0/apache-solr-3.4.0.tgz
tar -zxvf apache-solr-3.4.0.tgz
cd apache-solr-3.4.0

Starting Solr

Solr comes with an example directory which contains some sample files we can use.

We start this example server with java -jar start.jar.

cd example
java -jar start.jar

You should see something like this in the terminal.

2011-10-02 05:20:27.120:INFO::Logging to STDERR via org.mortbay.log.StdErrLog
2011-10-02 05:20:27.212:INFO::jetty-6.1-SNAPSHOT
....
2011-10-02 05:18:27.645:INFO::Started SocketConnector@0.0.0.0:8983

Solr is now running! You can now access the Solr Admin webapp by loading http://localhost:8983/solr/admin/ in your web browser.

Indexing Data

We're now going to add some sample data to our Solr instance.

The 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:

<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>

The post.sh shell script in the same folder provides a convenient way to add files to Solr via HTTP POST.

cd exampledocs
./post.sh monitor.xml

That produces:

Posting file monitor.xml to http://localhost:8983/solr/update
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<response>
<lst name="responseHeader"><int name="status">0</int><int name="QTime">89</int></lst>
</response>

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/select?q=*:*&wt=json

This returns the following JSON result:

{
"responseHeader": {
"status": 0,
"QTime": 0,
"params": {
"wt": "json",
"q": "*:*"
}
},
"response": {
"numFound": 1,
"start": 0,
"docs": [
{
"id": "3007WFP",
"name": "Dell Widescreen UltraSharp 3007WFP",
"manu": "Dell, Inc.",
"includes": "USB cable",
"weight": 401.6,
"price": 2199,
"popularity": 6,
"inStock": true,
"store": "43.17614,-90.57341",
"cat": [
"electronics",
"monitor"
],
"features": [
"30\" TFT active matrix LCD, 2560 x 1600, .25mm dot pitch, 700:1 contrast"
]
}
]
}
}

Nice! A quick verification with monitor.xml should confirm that all is in order.

Note that the previous search query used the special *:* syntax to retrieve all documents.

Let's now add all the XML documents, and do some real searching.

./post.sh *.xml

Here's a demonstration of retrieving the name and id of all documents with inStock = false: http://localhost:8983/solr/select?q=inStock:false&wt=json&fl=id,name

{
"responseHeader": {
"status": 0,
"QTime": 2,
"params": {
"wt": "json",
"q": "inStock:false",
"fl": "id,name"
}
},
"response": {
"numFound": 4,
"start": 0,
"docs": [
{
"id": "F8V7067-APL-KIT",
"name": "Belkin Mobile Power Cord for iPod w/ Dock"
},
{
"id": "IW-02",
"name": "iPod & iPod Mini USB 2.0 Cable"
},
{
"id": "EN7800GTX/2DHTV/256M",
"name": "ASUS Extreme N7800GTX/2DHTV (256 MB)"
},
{
"id": "100-435805",
"name": "ATI Radeon X1900 XTX 512 MB PCIE Video Card"
}
]
}
}

You'll learn more about the various URL query parameters in a separate tutorial.