VladGh.com

Solr is the popular, blazing fast open source enterprise search platform from the Apache Lucene project. Its major features include powerful full-text search, hit highlighting, faceted search, dynamic clustering, database integration, and rich document (e.g., Word, PDF) handling. Solr is highly scalable, providing distributed search and index replication, and it powers the search and navigation features of many of the world's largest internet sites.

Solr is written in Java and runs as a standalone full-text search server within a servlet container such as Tomcat. Solr uses the Lucene Java search library at its core for full-text indexing and search, and has REST-like HTTP/XML and JSON APIs that make it easy to use from virtually any programming language. Solr's powerful external configuration allows it to be tailored to almost any type of application without Java coding, and it has an extensive plugin architecture when more advanced customization is required.

To install Tomcat 6 in Ubuntu is like everything esle composed of only a few steps:

apt-get update && apt-get upgrade
apt-get install tomcat6 tomcat6-admin tomcat6-common tomcat6-user tomcat6-docs tomcat6-examples

If you want to be able to access the administration page, you will have to set a password:

vi /etc/tomcat6/tomcat-users.xml

Uncomment and modify the following lines (keep the admin and manager roles):

<tomcat-users>
<role rolename="admin"/>
<role rolename="manager"/>
<user username="vlad" password="XXXXXXXX" roles="admin,manager"/>
</tomcat-users>

Now let's download and "install" Solr. This is just as simple as copying the right files in the right place.

cd ~
wget http://www.motorlogy.com/apachemirror/lucene/solr/1.4.0/apache-solr-1.4.0.tgz
tar -zxvf apache-solr-1.4.0.tgz
cp ~/apache-solr-1.4.0/dist/apache-solr-1.4.0.war /usr/share/tomcat6/webapps/solr.war
cp -R ~/apache-solr-1.4.0/example/solr/ /usr/share/tomcat6/solr/

Also create the following file:

vi /etc/tomcat6/Catalina/localhost/solr.xml

And write the following lines:

<Context docBase="/usr/share/tomcat6/webapps/solr.war" debug="0" privileged="true" allowLinking="true" crossContext="true">
<Environment name="solr/home" type="java.lang.String" value="/usr/share/tomcat6/solr" override="true" />
</Context>

If you want to have multiple instances of solr you can add them as separate cores. You will have to define them in another solr.xml file:

cp ~/apache-solr-1.4.0/example/multicore/solr.xml /usr/share/tomcat6/solr/solr.xml

This is the configuration file in which you can add as many cores as you want.

<cores adminPath="/admin/cores">
    <core name="VladGh.com" instanceDir="vladgh.com" />
</cores>

Now create the folders, and copy the conf folder to each of them

mkdir /usr/share/tomcat6/solr/vladgh.com
mkdir /usr/share/tomcat6/solr/vladgh.com/data
chown -R tomcat6:tomcat6 /usr/share/tomcat6/solr/vladgh.com/data
cp -r /usr/share/tomcat6/solr/conf /usr/share/tomcat6/solr/vladgh.com/conf 

In this example I created the folder vladgh.com with the folder data inside it, all owned by tomcat6 user.

Next comes the drupal part:

drush dl apachesolr
svn checkout -r22 http://solr-php-client.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/ /srv/vladgh.com/sites/all/modules/apachesolr/SolrPhpClient

Here I am using Drush, but you can also simply download the project files from Drupal Modules and unzip it into your modules folder.

Then you will have to modify the schema files of solr to be used with drupal. They are located in the module folder you just downloaded.

mv /usr/share/tomcat6/solr/vladgh.com/conf/schema.xml /usr/share/tomcat6/solr/conf/schema.xml.original
mv /usr/share/tomcat6/solr/vladgh.com/conf/solrconfig.xml /usr/share/tomcat6/solr/conf/solrconfig.xml.original
ln -s /srv/vladgh.com/sites/all/modules/apachesolr/schema.xml /usr/share/tomcat6/solr/vladgh.com/conf/schema.xml
ln -s /srv/vladgh.com/sites/all/modules/apachesolr/solrconfig.xml /usr/share/tomcat6/solr/vladgh.com/conf/solrconfig.xml

Enable the module and go to the configuration page (http://example.com/admin/settings/apachesolr/settings)

Solr Hostname: localhost

Solr Port: 8080

Solr Path: /solr/VladGh.com (the argument provided here is the name of the core used earlier, case sensitive)

Also you can set the default behaviour in case of failure (to show core drupal results), and make this module the default search engine (Advanced Configuration -- Make Apache Solr Search the default)