Wednesday, May 23, 2012

Install Apache Solr 3.6 on Jelastic Cloud Tomcat 6 instance



1. Get Solr 3.6

a. Get Solr 3.6 from http://lucene.apache.org/solr/downloads.html

b. Uncompress the downloaded archive to any folder .. let's say a directory called Solr3_6
These are the contents of the downloaded archive


c. The files we are interested in are inside the example folder which contains an example Solr configuration.


d. We will set up this example configuration to run on a Tomcat 6 instance in Jelastic.

2. Setup Jelastic Environment

a. Get a trial Jelastic account if you do not have a Jelastic account already.

b. Click on Create Environment and Select Tomcat 6 as your Java Server. You can add a database , say MySQL , if you intend to index DB records.

c.Give the Environment a name and click apply.

d.Once the Environment has been created , click on Tomcat config


The webapps folder that you see corresponds to $Catalina.Home/webapps (/opt/tomcat/webapps)
The home folder corresponds to user.home (/opt/tomcat/temp)


e. Create a folder called solr under the webapps folder (1). This is where we will deploy Solr.

f. Create a folder called solr under the home folder (2). This will be Solr.Home with all the config files.

3. Upload Solr Files , Create Env entries, Deploy Solr

a. Click on the upload button under Deployment Manager. Choose solr.war file found inside example/webapps and upload it .


Before we deploy this to Tomcat , we need to do a bit more work.

b. Upload the contents of example/solr/conf to the solr folder created inside home (user.home/solr) .


c. We need to set the Solr.Home environment variable to point to user.home/solr . To do this make the following entry into the variables.conf file

-Dsolr.solr.home=/opt/tomcat/temp/solr





d. Now go back to deployment manager. Hovering the mouse over solr.war will give you the option to deploy or delete the file.



e. Click on Deploy and deploy to solr.



e. Restart tomcat if you need to.

f. Now you'll see solr.war deployed under Tomcat/solr . Click on the "open in browser" button to navigate to Solr.


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