Let's get up and running with Solr. At the time of writing of this book, the latest stable version of Solr was 7.1.0. This book focuses all its aspects on Apache Solr 7.1.0.

Getting up and running with Apache Solr requires the following prerequisites:

• Java 8 (mandatory)
• Cygwin (optional, recommended for Windows)
• curl (optional, recommended)

So, you will necessarily require JRE version 1.8 or higher for Solr to run. Go ahead! Open Command Prompt, type the following command, and check your Java version:

java -version

It should show the following output:

If your output is something different, it means Java is not properly installed and it needs to be installed properly. Also, the PATH variable should point to JRE 1.8. You can download Java from http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/downloads/index.html if needed.

Cygwin and curl utilities are...

Let's now understand the constituents of Solr, its directory structure, and the significance of each folder and the configurations involved. This diagram shows the parent-level directory of Solr, along with an explanation of each folder:

Let's look at the major folders and files we will be dealing with.

The bin folder has all the scripts primarily needed to get up and running with Solr. Mainly, we will be using Solr and post scripts for our day-to-day purposes. It is also the location to place the replication scripts for more advanced setup, if needed. The bin folder is home to the following utilities: it contains the solr.in.sh and solr.in.cmd files...

Let's start with running and configuring our Solr. We will see several ways of running Solr, some configurations needed for Solr to be in production mode, and more. The following topics will be covered:

• Solr startup
• Production-level Solr setup and configurations

Earlier, we started Solr in interactive mode, where we picked up the cloud as the default config set. Let's revisit the Solr startup commands.

If you want to start Solr with a custom port, then you can use the following command:

bin\solr.cmd start -p 8984

Similar to start, there's a command stop. To stop Solr, simply use the following...

Now that we've got acquainted with Solr and the various commands involved in Solr's day-to-day usage, let's populate it with data so that we can query it as needed. Solr comes with sample data in examples. We will use the same $solr_home/example/films for our queries.

Fire up the terminal and create a collection films with 10 shards:

 solr\bin create -c films -shards 10

Now, in $solr_home/example/films there is file called file.json. Let's import it into our collection, films. Based on your OS, hit the appropriate command for the post script or post.jar.

Uh Oh!! It throws an error, as follows:

What must have gone wrong? By checking the logs while creating the collection, you must have seen a warning.

To...

Now that our Solr is loaded up with data, we will look at multiple queries and the browse interface, through which we can query without actually knowing the end points. The data provided in techproducts includes a wide variety of fields along with geospatial indexes. So let's use that for a change. Open up the terminal and hit bin\solr.cmd -e techproducts -p 4202. As we have loaded a sample techproducts config set, it will import a bunch of files into the collection while starting up the server.

Once the server is up and running, hit http://localhost:4202/solr/techproducts/browse to check out the browse interface provided by Solr, as shown in the following screenshot:

It is just another Google search for electronics now. Go ahead and type the query string parameter. It will autocomplete and display the results as needed.

The following...

Solr provides a web interface for feasibility of Solr administrators and programmers to perform the following operations easily:

• View Solr configuration details
• Run different queries against indexes
• Analyze document fields to fine-tune the Solr config set
• Provide a schema browser for easy querying
• Show the java properties of each core

And much more... Under the hood, Solr reuses the same HTTP APIs that are available to all clients. Let us look at the Solr admin panel in detail. Go and start up Solr with the config set we created earlier. Accessing http://localhost:7574/solr or http://localhost:8983/solr will open up the Solr admin dashboard. The whole screen is divided into two parts:

• The left part showing the navigational menu
• The right part showing the interface selected menu

Let's take a deep dive into each of the sections.

In this chapter, we got started with Solr. We saw the various options available to start Solr and saw the directory and folder structure of Solr in detail. We learned how to run Solr as service, Solr and ZooKeeper configurations, how to load some sample data from documents and databases, the browse interface, and the Admin UI in detail.

Let's move on to designing a schema in the next chapter. We will learn how to design it using documents and fields. We will go through various field types and see the schema API. We will also look at the schemaless mode.