Installing Apache Solr

This page describes how to install and start Apache Solr 7 and create a new Solr core based on a Magnolia configuration set. Apache Solr is a standalone enterprise-grade search platform that's needed together with the Magnolia Solr module for high-performance searches of large volumes of documents.

Getting Apache Solr

Download Apache Solr and extract the zip to your computer. 

Creating a configuration set

Create a new Magnolia config set by duplicating the $SOLR_HOME/server/solr/configsets/_default folder and name it to magnolia_data_driven_schema_configs . 

In this new configuration set you need to create or modify two files, solrconfig.xml and managed-schema:

• solrconfig.xml , a configuration file with the most parameters affecting Solr itself.
• managed-schema , a file that specifies what fields the Magnolia content can contain, how those fields are added to the index, and how they are queried.
  For further details see https://lucene.apache.org/solr/guide/7_3/documents-fields-and-schema-design.html.

Configuration example

 Please be aware that different Solr versions may require different content in the Solr configuration files. The example configuration files attached below are for Solr 7.3.0.

Download the following example configuration files (based on Solr data_driven_schema_configs https://lucene.apache.org/solr/guide/7_3/config-sets.html) and replace with them the default files in the newly created set magnolia_data_driven_schema_configs/conf:

• managed-schema
• solrconfig.xml

Starting Solr

Go to the $SOLR_HOME/bin folder and start the Solr server:

./solr start

Check if Solr is running

Check if Solr is running by issuing the following command:

./solr status  

Creating a new core

A core is a running instance of a Lucene index along with all the Solr configuration required to use it. Create a new core called magnolia:

./solr create_core -c magnolia -d magnolia_data_driven_schema_configs

Use the admin dashboard

By opening  http://localhost:8983/solr/ you may use Solr's admin dashboard.  Form there you can also create cores: