Documentation Home
Changelog

Stand Alone Solr Server

It is usually beneficial, and even necessary, to use Sorl in a stand-alone mode. This is different than Embedded Solr because it allow Solr to run as a network service on its own or on a shared piece of hardware. This allows you to scale Solr independently. It allows all of your web application nodes to share a single Solr server. This is different than Embedded Solr because when Solr is embedded it does not run as a networked resource. It also does not let you query or manage it outside of the application. Stand-alone Solr allows for these things.

Installing a Stand Alone Solr Server

In order to use Solr in a stand-alone way, download the latest Solr distribution and unpack it to an appropriate location on the file system. Let's assume this is /path/to/solr-5.3.1 Then, do the following:

  1. Create a folder, possibly outside of the Solr distribution, to hold configuration and index data. We'll call this solr.home, and can be assigned by using the -s flag when starting Solr. This is not the location of the installation, but of the data associated with a running instance. For purposes of illustration, let's assume that this is /path/to/solr/home
  2. Copy the solr.xml file from /path/to/solr-5.3.1/server/solr/solr.xml to /path/to/solr/home/solr.xml
  3. Create a directory called primary and another directory called reindex under /path/to/solr/home/
  4. Under the primary directory, create a file called core.properties and add the following line to the file: name=primary
  5. Under the primary directory create a folder called conf and another called data
  6. Copy the solrconfig.xml file from your project's site/src/main/resources/solrconfig.xml to /path/to/solr/home/primary/conf/solrconfig.xml
  7. Copy the schema.xml file from your project's site/src/main/resources/schema.xml to /path/to/solr/home/primary/conf/schema.xml
  8. Under the reindex directory, create a file called core.properties and add the following line to the file: name=reindex
  9. Under the reindex directory create a folder called conf and another called data
  10. Copy the solrconfig.xml file from your project's site/src/main/resources/solrconfig.xml to /path/to/solr/home/reindex/conf/solrconfig.xml
  11. Copy the schema.xml file from your project's site/src/main/resources/schema.xml to /path/to/solr/home/reindex/conf/schema.xml

Starting a Stand Alone Solr Server

Now that Solr has been generally configured, and has been specifically pre-configured with 2 cores (primary and reindex), each with their own copy of Broadleaf's solrconfig.xml and schema.xml, you can start the Solr server. To do so, you can cd to /path/to/solr-5.3.1/bin and execute the following command: ./solr -p 8983 -s /path/to/solr/home. This will start Solr on port 8983 and will tell Solr to use your newly configured Solr home directory for its configuration and data. Doing this also sets -Dsolr.home=/path/to/solr/home as a system property. This allows you to start multiple instances of Solr on a single machine, each pointing to a different solr.home directory.

You can test your configuration by going http://localhost:8983/solr/primary/select?q=* or http://localhost:8983/solr/reindex/select?q=* in your browser, or using curl. This should return an empty result, assuming you don't have any data in your index.

To stop Solr, you can cd to /path/to/solr-5.3.1/bin and call ./solr stop -p 8983. This stops the Solr server instance listening on port 8983.

Additional Notes

The solrconfig.xml and schema.xml files that are copied from Broadleaf are starting points or recommended configurations. They can be modified as necessary for your specific needs.