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Apache Solr™ is an Open source, fast search platform developed under the Apache Lucene project.

It provides several search engines with features as follows:

- powerful full-text search
- hit highlighting
- faceted search
- dynamic clustering
- database integration
- rich document (e.g., Word, PDF) handling
- geospatial search

With all features mentioned above, it represents a highly scalable distributed search and index replication, used as navigation search of some the largest web sites. It's completely written in Java and runs as standalone search application under Tomcat services. As it's developed under Apache Lucene project, it relays on it's libraries. With HTTP/XML and JSON APIs, it is easy to use by virtually any programming language. By external configuration ability, it can be adjusted to almost any type of application without the need for direct Java coding. It also contains plugins when it comes to most extensive and demanding requirements.

In order to view detailed list of features please refer to it's official pages at feature list.

Getting started with Solr™

Complete application can be downloaded from here. It comes as binary, ready to use application, archived into file. Once downloaded it has to be unpacked into desired folder at hosted server where Tomcat will be able to mount it up as an application.

Overview

Basics configuration and running Solr with an example schema using sample data is described below.

Requirements

In order to startup Solr™ some basics requirements have to be met at the server where the Solr™ is going to be installed and run.

- Java 6 at least, which can be downloaded from Oracle, Open JDK or IBM official sites.
jRocket , Java from Oracle, and jdk 1.6 from OpenJDK are offered at hosting]
- Apache Solr™ release which can be downloaded from Apache mirrors from list.

After downloading release from one of offered links place archive to desired folder. Here the apache-solr-3.3.0.zip will be used as reference. Unzip it within folder and enter apache-solr-3.3.0 folder which will be created automatically after the archive is unzipped. Enter example sub-folder. Solr™ can be started up as standalone app when it's binded to port 8983, www.YOUR_DOMAIN:8983 or you can place war archive from webapps/solr.war to Tomcat's web app folder
In case you've placed under Tomcat container, it'll be mounted up once the Tomcat is started.
Whichever option you chose, you'll be able to access it via web browser where default welcome page will appear, providing Solr Admin interface from where various queries could be performed.
Queries can be also performed from within server's shell prompt.
With Solr™ server now running, some documents have to be indexed for later search.
To start it up with some basics documents, do indexing from folder example/exampledocs and do the command java -jar post.jar solr.xml monitor.xml
This will add two documents into the index base and will prepare them for basic search.
From Solr Admin web page, some queries can be performed against these two documents. Other documents can also be indexed for later search with command java -jar post.jar *.xml
This will index all existing xml documents from exampledocs folder.
Various queries can be done using [http://wiki.apache.org/solr/SolrQuerySyntax Solr Query Syntax}. This can be achieved from shell prompt or from within web form.
Solr™ also provides basic sort feature of retrieved contents by queries performed against indexed documents.

Commands for indexing, deleting or adding new documents to index can be done only if the server is started as standalone with command java -jar post.jar solr.xml monitor.xml
There are wast amount of features as well that Solr™ offers and these can be found on Solr™ official pages, if you are interested.