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Multi Core Apache Solr on Ubuntu 10.04 for Drupal with Auto Provisioning

Apache Solr is an excellent full text index search engine based on Lucene. Solr is increasingly being used in the Drupal community for search. I use it for search for a lot of my projects. Recently Steve Edwards at Drupal Connect blogged about setting up a mutli core Solr server on Ubuntu 9.10 (aka Karmic). Ubuntu 10.04LTS was released a couple of months ago and it makes the process a bit easier, as Apache Solr 1.4 has been packaged. An additional advantage of using 10.04LTS is that it is supported until April 2015, whereas support for 9.10 ends in 10 months - April 2011.

As an added bonus in this howto you will be able to auto provision solr cores just by calling the right URL.

In this tutorial I will be using Jetty rather than tomcat which some tutorials recommend, as Jetty performs well and generally uses less resources.

Install Solr and Jetty

Installing jetty and Solr just requires a single command: sudo apt-get install solr-jetty openjdk-6-jdk.

This will pull down Solr and all of the dependencies, which can be alot if you have a very stripped down basic server.

Configuring Jetty

Configuring Jetty is very straight forward. First we backup the existing /etc/default/jetty file by running sudo cp -a /etc/default/jetty /etc/default/jetty.bak

Then change your /etc/default/jetty to be like this (the changes are highlighted):

# Defaults for jetty see /etc/init.d/jetty for more

# change to 0 to allow Jetty to start
NO_START=0
#NO_START=1

# change to 'no' or uncomment to use the default setting in /etc/default/rcS
VERBOSE=yes

# Run Jetty as this user ID (default: jetty)
# Set this to an empty string to prevent Jetty from starting automatically
#JETTY_USER=jetty

# Listen to connections from this network host (leave empty to accept all connections)
#Uncomment to restrict access to localhost
#JETTY_HOST=$(uname -n)
JETTY_HOST=solr.example.com

# The network port used by Jetty
#JETTY_PORT=8080

# Timeout in seconds for the shutdown of all webapps
#JETTY_SHUTDOWN=30

# Additional arguments to pass to Jetty
#JETTY_ARGS=

# Extra options to pass to the JVM
#JAVA_OPTIONS="-Xmx256m -Djava.awt.headless=true"

# Home of Java installation.
#JAVA_HOME=

# The first existing directory is used for JAVA_HOME (if JAVA_HOME is not
# defined in /etc/default/jetty). Should contain a list of space separated directories.
#JDK_DIRS="/usr/lib/jvm/default-java /usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun"

# Java compiler to use for translating JavaServer Pages (JSPs). You can use all
# compilers that are accepted by Ant's build.compiler property.
#JSP_COMPILER=jikes

# Jetty uses a directory to store temporary files like unpacked webapps
#JETTY_TMP=/var/cache/jetty

# Jetty uses a config file to setup its boot classpath
#JETTY_START_CONFIG=/etc/jetty/start.config

# Default for number of days to keep old log files in /var/log/jetty/
#LOGFILE_DAYS=14

If you don’t include the JETTY_HOST entry Jetty will only bind to the local loopback interface, which is all you need if your drupal webserver is running on the same machine. If you set the JETTY_HOST make sure you configure your firewall to restrict access to the Solr server.

Configuring Solr

I am assuming you have already installed the Apache Solr module for Drupal somewhere. If you haven’t, do that now, as you will need some config files which ship with it.

First we enable the multicore support in Solr by creating a file called /usr/share/solr/solr.xml with the following contents:

<solr persistent="true" sharedLib="lib">
  <cores adminPath="/admin/cores" shareSchema="true" adminHandler="au.com.davehall.solr.plugins.SolrCoreAdminHandler">
  </cores>
</solr>

You need to make sure the file is owned by the jetty user if you want it to be dynamically updated, otherwise change persistent="true" to persistent="false", don’t include the adminHandler attribute and don’t run the commands below. Also if you want to auto provision cores you will need to download the jar file attached to this post (code no longer available) and drop it into the /usr/share/solr/lib directory (which you’ll need to create).

sudo chown jetty:jetty /usr/share/solr
sudo chown jetty:jetty /usr/share/solr/solr.xml
sudo chmod 640 /usr/share/solr/solr.xml
sudo mkdir /usr/share/solr/cores
sudo chown jetty:jetty /usr/share/solr/cores

To keep your configuration centralised, symlink the file from /usr/share/solr to /etc/solr. Do this by calling sudo ln -s /usr/share/solr/solr.xml /etc/solr/. Don’t do it the other way, Solr will ignore the symlink.

Solr needs to be configured for Drupal. First we backup the existing config file, just in case, like so:

sudo mv /etc/solr/conf/schema.xml /etc/solr/conf/schema.orig.xml
sudo mv /etc/solr/conf/solrconfig.xml /etc/solr/conf/solrconfig.orig.xml

Now we copy the Drupal Solr config files from where you installed the module by running

sudo cp /path/to/drupal-install/sites/all/modules/contrib/apachesolr/{schema,solrconfig}.xml /etc/solr/conf/

Solr needs the path to exist for each core’s data files, so we create them with the following commands:

sudo mkdir -p /var/lib/solr/cores/{,subdomain_}example_com/{data,conf}
sudo chown -R jetty:jetty /var/lib/solr/cores/{,subdomain_}example_com

Each of the cores need their own configuration files. We could implement some hacks to use a common set of configuration files, but that will make life more difficult if we ever have to migrate some of cores. Just copy the common configuration for all the cores:

sudo bash -c 'for core in /var/lib/solr/cores/*; do cp -a /etc/solr/conf/ $core/; done'

If everything is configured correctly, we should just be able to start Jetty like so:

sudo /etc/init.d/jetty start

If you visit http://solr.example.com:8080/solr/admin/cores?action=STATUS you should get some xml that looks something like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<response>
  <lst name="responseHeader">
      <int name="status">0</int>
      <int name="QTime">0</int>
  </lst>
  <lst name="status"/>
</response>

If you get the above output everything is working properly

If you enabled auto provisioning of Solr cores, you should now be able to create your first core. Point your browser at http://solr.example.com:8080/solr/admin/cores?action=CREATE&name=test1&instanceDir=test1 If it works you should get output similar to the following:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<response>
  <lst name="responseHeader">
      <int name="status">0</int>
      <int name="QTime">1561</int>
  </lst>
  <str name="core">test1</str>
  <str name="saved">/usr/share/solr/solr.xml</str>
</response>

I would recommend using identifiable names for your cores, so for davehall.com.au I would call the core, “davehall_com_au” so I can easily find it later on.

Security Note: As anyone who can access your server can now provision solr cores, make sure you restrict access to port 8080 to only allow access from trusted IP addresses.

For more information on the commands available, refer to the Solr Core Admin API documenation on the Solr wik.

Next in this series will be how to use this auto provisioning setup to allow aegir to provision Solr cores as sites are created.

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