Running Solr

There are multiple ways of installing Solr on a Windows machine. Here, I have explained the way to set up Solr with Jetty running as a service via NSSM:

To install Solr on Linux/Unix, you will need Java Runtime Environment (JRE) version 1.7 or higher. Then follow these steps:

Thus, by the end of the installation, your Solr is up and running. But since we have not fed any data into Solr, it will not index any data. Let's try to insert some example data into our server.

The Solr download comes with example data bundled in it. We can use the same data for indexing as an example. Go to the exampledocs directory under the example directory. Here, you will see a lot of files. Now go to the command line (terminal) and type the following commands:

$ cd $SOLR_HOME/example/exampledocs/
$ ./post.sh vidcard.xml

Within the post.sh file, the script will call http://localhost:8983/solr/update using curl to post xml data from the vidcard.xml file. When the import completes (without any error), you will see a message that looks something like this:

Now let's try to check out our imported data from web browser. Try http://localhost:8983/solr/select?q=*:*&wt=json to fetch all of the data in your Solr instance, like this:

When you see the preceding data, it means that your Solr server is running properly and is ready to index your desired feed. You will be reading indexing in depth in upcoming chapters.