Simon Willison’s Weblog

How can I install apache solr?

3rd August 2012

My answer to How can I install apache solr? on Quora

Solr is a powerful full-text search engine wrapped up in a REST-ish web API. It needs to run as part of a web server—but the default download package includes Jetty which is definitely good enough for starting to try out the software (and I’d argue easily good enough to run in production).

You’ll need to have Java installed, but assuming you do the quickest way to get started with Solr is to download a release, unzip it, then use the command line to find the examples directory (the one containing the start.jar file) and run “java -jar start.jar” to start Solr running—then visit http://localhost:8983/solr to begin playing with the default web interface.