Solr Tutorials

This tutorial covers getting Solr up and running, ingesting a variety of data sources into Solr collections, and getting a feel for the Solr administrative and search interfaces.

The tutorial is organized into a number of sections that each build on the one before it.

The first exercise will ask you to start Solr, create a collection, index some basic documents, and then perform some searches.

The second exercise works with a different set of data, and explores requesting facets with the dataset.

The third exercise encourages you to begin to work with your own data and start a plan for your implementation.

The tutorial also includes other, more advanced, exercises that introduce you to ParamSets, vector search, SolrCloud, and deploying Solr to AWS.

Finally, we’ll introduce spatial search, and show you how to get your Solr instance back into a clean state.

Before You Begin

To follow along with this tutorial, you will need…​

  1. To meet the system requirements

  2. An Apache Solr release download. This tutorial is designed for Apache Solr 9.7.

For best results, please run the browser showing this tutorial and the Solr server on the same machine so tutorial links will correctly point to your Solr server.

Unpack Solr

Begin by unzipping the full Solr release and changing your working directory to the subdirectory where Solr was installed. For example, with a shell in UNIX, Cygwin, or macOS:

$ ls solr*
solr-{solr-full-version}.tgz

$ tar -xzf solr-{solr-full-version}.tgz

$ cd solr-{solr-full-version}/

If you’d like to know more about Solr’s directory layout before moving to the first exercise, see the section Directory Layout for details.

Start with the exercises

Navigate to Exercise 0: Five Minutes to Searching! to get started. Don’t worry, you can come back to this page at a later point, after you’re done with the exercises.

Spatial Queries

Solr has sophisticated geospatial support, including searching within a specified distance range of a given location (or within a bounding box), sorting by distance, or even boosting results by the distance.

Some of the example techproducts documents we indexed in Exercise 1 have locations associated with them to illustrate the spatial capabilities. To reindex this data, see Exercise 1.

To learn more about Solr’s spatial capabilities, see the section Spatial Search.

Wrapping Up

If you’ve run the full set of commands in this quick start guide you have done the following:

  • Launched Solr into SolrCloud mode, two nodes, two collections including shards and replicas

  • Indexed several types of files

  • Used the Schema API to modify your schema

  • Opened the admin console, used its query interface to get results

  • Opened the /browse interface to explore Solr’s features in a more friendly and familiar interface

Nice work!

Cleanup

As you work through this tutorial, you may want to stop Solr and reset the environment back to the starting point. The following command line will stop Solr and remove the directories for each of the two nodes that were created all the way back in Exercise 1:

$ bin/solr stop --all
$ rm -Rf example/cloud/

Where to next?

This Guide will be your best resource for learning more about Solr.

Solr also has a robust community made up of people happy to help you get started. For more information, check out the Solr website’s Resources page.