How to run Solr 4 in Tomcat locally?

Question

I've been trying to set up Solr 4.3 on my home PC (in Tomcat 7) but it doesn't run. I have set up Tomcat and deployed the solr.war file which both unpacks and shows up in the Tomcat Web Apps Manager screen in Tomcat but its not running and clicking the start button doesn't do anything (as it should already be running in the first place).

Here is my solr.xml context file in Tomcat which also gives the path to the solr.war file and where my solr Cores are (which is the default Collection1):

<Context path="/solr" docBase="C:/LocalApps/Tomcat/apache-tomcat-7.0.40/webapps/solr.war" debug="0" crossContext="true">
<Environment name="solr/home" type="java.lang.String" value="C:/LocalApps/Solr/solr-4.3.0/example/solr/" override="true"/>
</Context>

this is the error log in tomcat:

INFO: Starting Servlet Engine: Apache Tomcat/7.0.40
Jun 09, 2013 11:04:07 PM org.apache.catalina.startup.HostConfig deployDescriptor
INFO: Deploying configuration descriptor C:\LocalApps\Tomcat\apache-tomcat-7.0.40\conf\Catalina\localhost\solr.xml
Jun 09, 2013 11:04:07 PM org.apache.catalina.startup.HostConfig deployDescriptor
WARNING: A docBase C:\LocalApps\Tomcat\apache-tomcat-7.0.40\webapps\solr.war inside the host appBase has been specified, and will be ignored
Jun 09, 2013 11:04:07 PM org.apache.catalina.startup.SetContextPropertiesRule begin
WARNING: [SetContextPropertiesRule]{Context} Setting property 'debug' to '0' did not find a matching property.
Jun 09, 2013 11:04:09 PM org.apache.catalina.core.StandardContext startInternal
SEVERE: Error filterStart
Jun 09, 2013 11:04:09 PM org.apache.catalina.core.StandardContext startInternal
SEVERE: Context [/solr] startup failed due to previous errors

Answer 1

You need to install the jars for logging as explained here.

Just copy all the mentioned files into your tomcat/lib dir. And restart Tomcat.

1. Copy the jars from solr/example/lib/ext into your container's main lib directory. These jars will set up SLF4J and log4j. Exactly where this lib directory is highly variable. For a Debian or Ubuntu server using the Tomcat package available from the OS vendor, this is likely to be /usr/share/tomcat6/lib or /usr/share/tomcat7/lib.
2. Copy the logging config from solr/example/resources/log4j.properties into a location on the classpath. Usually you can use the same location as the jar files above. Edit the configuration file for your preferred log destination.
3. Optionally, if you did not place log4j.properties on the classpath, set java option -Dlog4j.configuration=file:///path/to/log4j.properties

Answer 2

1. Download latest solr-4.x.zip file.
2. Extract zip file somewhere like C:\solr setup.
3. Apache Tomcat (version greater than 5) and Java 6 or greater should be installed. Copy solr-4.x.war file from “C:\solr setup\solr-4.3.0\dist” to “Apache Tomcat” webapps folder most probably in C:\Program Files\Apache...\Tomcat...\webapps\ and rename copied war file to some meaningful name like solrTest.Start Tomcat. If already running then restart Tomcat. New folder with same name as of war file (solrTest) will be created.
4. Stop Tomcat. Copy bin and collection1 folders from C:\solr setup\solr-4.x\example\solr to C:\Program Files\Apache ...\Tomcat...\webapps\solrTest.
5. Copy all jars from C:\solr setup\solr-4.x\example\lib\ext to C:\Program Files\Apache...\Tomcat...\lib. SOLR 4.x will use these jars for logging.
6. Create xml file in C:\Program Files\Apache...\Tomcat...\conf\Catalina\localhost\ with same name as of war file (solrTest.xml) with contents as given below. Tomcat looks for this xml file to get a start of the application.
7. Update C:\Program Files\Apache...\Tomcat...\webapps\solrTest\collection1\conf\schema.xml and add required fields and update too.
8. Remove copy fields if not required. Usage of copy fields is available in same file.
9. Update C:\Program Files\Apache...\Tomcat...\webapps\solrTest\collection1\conf\solrconfig.xml. Update physical index path in tag like ${solr.data.dir:C:/Indexes/solrTest Index/}. If it will be commented then C:\Program Files\Apache...\Tomcat...\webapps\solrTest\collection1\data\ directory will be used by default. DataDir tag is available in file. No need to add your own.
10. Update replication entries to set either master or slave in replication request handler.
11. Try accessing “...localhost:portNumber/solrTest”. If no error comes then you have successfully configured SOLR 4.x.

Answer 3

The easiest way to get started with Solr on Tomcat is to use HDS (Heliosearch Distribution for Solr), a Tomcat/Solr distribution

It's a super-set of Apache Solr, containing an additional "server" directory that is a pre-configured (threads, logging, connection settings, message sizes, etc) Tomcat based Solr server.

Some other implementation notes:

• start scripts can be run from anywhere, and allow passing JVM args on command line (just like jetty, so it makes it easier to use)
• start scripts work around known JVM bugs
• start scripts allow setting port from command line, and default stop port based off of http port to make it easy to run multiple servers on a single box)
• zkcli, the start script for the solr zookeeper tool, will auto-explode the WAR if necessary
• the "server" directory has been kept clean but stuffing all of tomcat under the "server/tc" directory

To start:

$ cd server
$ bin/startup.sh

To start on a different port (e.g. 7574):

$ cd server
$ bin/startup.sh -Dhttp.port=7574

To shut down:

$ cd server
$ bin/shutdown.sh -Dhttp.port=7574

The scripts even accept -Djetty.port=7574 to make it easier to cut-n-paste from start examples using jetty. The "example" directory is still there too, so you can still run the jetty based server if you want.

Answer 4

Check the localhost_yyyy_mm_dd.log logs created by Tomcat. It should typically show you the reason for this issue. Full stack trace might not be displayed in console...

Answer 5

I had some problem doing the same thing, the official documentation is not really helpful about this. I wrote a blog post about it which reads:

1. Solr install

   Download and unpack the latest version of Solr, somewhere on the disk.

   cd /tmp
   wget "http://mirrors.ircam.fr/pub/apache/lucene/solr/4.6.0/solr-4.6.0.tgz"
   cd /opt
   sudo tar zxvf /tmp/solr-4.6.0.tgz
   sudo chown -R tomcat:tomcat solr-4.6.0
   

   Here, I use /opt, but you can install it anywhere as long as Tomcat has access to it. Just to be sure, make Tomcat the owner, so it can read and write in Solr folders.

2. Deployment

   Now, let's deploy the Solr webapp on Tomcat. To do so, we will take advantage of an XML context configuration file, wich we will use to deploy and configure Solr.

   In your Tomcat installation folder, create a new XML context configuration file in conf/Catalina/localhost. The base name of the file will define the Solr context path.

   We first need to define ${solr.home}. Here, we use the example Solr configuration provided in the distribution. It is located in /opt/solr-4.6.1/example/solr.

   To avoid startup errors, we need to add some jars to the webapp classpath, located in /opt/solr-4.6.1/example/lib/ext. But we don't want to pollute Tomcat's lib folder with Solr jars, so we just declare a virtual loader.

   We also need to configure Log4J properly. Here we use the Log4J configuration file provided in Solr distribution in /opt/solr-4.6.1/example/resources, by adding the folder in Solr classpath.

   <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
   <Context docBase="/opt/solr-4.6.1/dist/solr-4.6.1.war">
     <Environment
       name="solr/home"
       type="java.lang.String"
       value="/opt/solr-4.6.1/example/solr"
       override="true" />
     <Loader
       className="org.apache.catalina.loader.VirtualWebappLoader"
       virtualClasspath="/opt/solr-4.6.1/example/lib/ext/*.jar;/opt/solr-4.6.1/example/resources/" />
   </Context>
   

   Save the file, wait for Tomcat to read it and deploy the war.

That's it! Solr is up and running.

Answer 6

Here is instruction provided by Tony at Drupal for Windows with XAMPP installed:

Preliminaries

• Make yourself a nice cup of tea
• Make sure you have the Windows Java environment installed. It's up to version 6 at the moment.
• I assume you use XAMPP to run Apache and MySQL and latest version of PHP5

Installing Tomcat

1. If you installed XAMPP with Tomcat, go to your Service Tray, stop XAMPP services and remove the Tomcal directory from within your XAMPP installation. Then restart your XAMPP again. The reason is that you want to be able to configure Tomcat easily from Services Tray in Windows. If Tomcat runs under XAMPP, it does not show up in the Services Tray.
2. Before you install Tomcat, copy the file c:\windows\microsoft.net\framework\v1.1.4322\msvcr71.dll to c:\windows\system32\msvcr71.dll If you don't do this, Tomcat won't start up.
3. Now install Tomcat 6.x. Start it running. You should get a page showing at http://localhost:8080 if Tomcat is working.
4. Have a peek at the file structure of Tomcat. It is very straightforward. Note the directory called webapps.
5. Now have a nice cup of tea.

If you're on Linux, check: Apache Solr 4.6.0 installation.