How to Install Solr on Tomcat

Solr is a Java search engine that can be used to search through a website's documents. Solr is an attractive, technologically advanced alternative to Google Site Search. Unlike that enterprise product from Google, it's free and is open-source software. You can install Solr on your Tomcat Java servlet.

Things You'll Need

• Know how to set the Java classpath or the Tomcat classpath

Instructions

1. Download the Solr application. Decompress the file.

2. Among the decompressed files, find a folder named "Dist." This is the folder for the Solr distributions. Inside your will find a war file. It will be called something similar to apache-solr-1.X.X.war.

3. Copy this war file to the webapps directory under your Tomcat installation. The war file should decompress automatically if Tomcat is running.

4. Go back to the download that you decompressed in Step 1. Find several XML and TXT files that are located under the example solr/conf directory.

5. Copy the the XML and TXT files anywhere you like. Add the directory that they reside in to to the classpath or to Tomcat's classpath.

6. Restart Tomcat. Enter http://localhost:8080/solr/ in the address bar of your Web browser. A "Welcome to Solr!" message displays.

Tips & Warnings

• Make sure that you add the files to the classpath and that the classpath is visible to your Tomcat instance.

References

• Google Site Search
• Apache Tomcat

Resources

• Solr Homepage