Exercise 1: Index Techproducts Data

To launch Solr, run: bin/solr start -e cloud on Unix or MacOS; bin\solr.cmd start -e cloud on Windows.

This will start an interactive session that will start two Solr "servers" on your machine. This command has an option to run without prompting you for input (-noprompt), but we want to modify two of the defaults so we won’t use that option now.

The first prompt asks how many nodes we want to run. Note the [2] at the end of the last line; that is the default number of nodes. Two is what we want for this example, so you can simply press enter.

This will be the port that the first node runs on. Unless you know you have something else running on port 8983 on your machine, accept this default option also by pressing enter. If something is already using that port, you will be asked to choose another port.

This is the port the second node will run on. Again, unless you know you have something else running on port 7574 on your machine, accept this default option also by pressing enter. If something is already using that port, you will be asked to choose another port.

Solr will now initialize itself and start running on those two nodes. The script will print the commands it uses for your reference.

Notice that two instances of Solr have started on two nodes. Because we are starting in SolrCloud mode, and did not define any details about an external ZooKeeper cluster, Solr launches its own ZooKeeper and connects both nodes to it.

After startup is complete, you’ll be prompted to create a collection to use for indexing data.

Here’s the first place where we’ll deviate from the default options. This tutorial will ask you to index some sample data included with Solr, called the "techproducts" data. Let’s name our collection "techproducts" so it’s easy to differentiate from other collections we’ll create later. Enter techproducts at the prompt and hit enter.

This is asking how many shards you want to split your index into across the two nodes. Choosing "2" (the default) means we will split the index relatively evenly across both nodes, which is a good way to start. Accept the default by hitting enter.

A replica is a copy of the index that’s used for failover (see also the Solr Glossary definition). Again, the default of "2" is fine to start with here also, so accept the default by hitting enter.

We’ve reached another point where we will deviate from the default option. Solr has two sample sets of configuration files (called a configset) available out-of-the-box.

A collection must have a configset, which at a minimum includes the two main configuration files for Solr: the schema file (named either managed-schema.xml or schema.xml), and solrconfig.xml. The question here is which configset you would like to start with. The _default is a bare-bones option, but note there’s one whose name includes "techproducts", the same as we named our collection. This configset is specifically designed to support the sample data we want to use, so enter sample_techproducts_configs at the prompt and hit enter.

At this point, Solr will create the collection and again output to the screen the commands it issues.

Congratulations! Solr is ready for data!

You can see that Solr is running by launching the Solr Admin UI in your web browser: http://localhost:8983/solr/. This is the main starting point for administering Solr.

Solr will now be running two "nodes", one on port 7574 and one on port 8983. There is one collection created automatically, techproducts, a two shard collection, each with two replicas.

The Cloud tab in the Admin UI diagrams the collection nicely:

Your Solr server is up and running, but it doesn’t contain any data yet, so we can’t do any queries.

Solr includes the bin/post tool in order to facilitate indexing various types of documents easily. We’ll use this tool for the indexing examples below.

You’ll need a command shell to run some of the following examples, rooted in the Solr install directory; the shell from where you launched Solr works just fine.

The data we will index is in the example/exampledocs directory. The documents are in a mix of document formats (JSON, CSV, etc.), and fortunately we can index them all at once:

You should see output similar to the following:

Congratulations again! You have data in your Solr!

Now we’re ready to start searching.

Solr can be queried via REST clients, curl, wget, Chrome POSTMAN, etc., as well as via native clients available for many programming languages.

The Solr Admin UI includes a query builder interface via the Query tab for the techproducts collection (at http://localhost:8983/solr/#/techproducts/query). If you click the Execute Query button without changing anything in the form, you’ll get 10 documents in JSON format:

The URL sent by the Admin UI to Solr is shown in light grey near the top right of the above screenshot. If you click on it, your browser will show you the raw response.

To use curl, give the same URL shown in your browser in quotes on the command line:

What’s happening here is that we are using Solr’s query parameter (q) with a special syntax that requests all documents in the index (*:*). All of the documents are not returned to us, however, because of the default for a parameter called rows, which you can see in the form is 10. You can change the parameter in the UI or in the defaults if you wish.

Solr has very powerful search options, and this tutorial won’t be able to cover all of them. But we can cover some of the most common types of queries.

At this point, you’ve seen how Solr can index data and have done some basic queries. You can choose now to continue to the next example which will introduce more Solr concepts, such as faceting results and managing your schema, or you can strike out on your own.

If you decide not to continue with this tutorial, the data we’ve indexed so far is likely of little value to you. You can delete your installation and start over, or you can use the bin/solr script we started out with to delete this collection:

And then create a new collection:

To stop both of the Solr nodes we started, issue the command:

For more information on start/stop and collection options with bin/solr, see Solr Control Script Reference.