This page is currently out of date; these instructions apply to VuFind 2.x but need to be updated for the changes introduced during the Solr 5 upgrade in VuFind 3.0.

You may find that you want to install VuFind's front-end on one server (e.g. campus shared hosting) while Solr resides on another. Here are some options (based on Ubuntu 14.04, but hopefully adaptable).

For whichever option, you must make sure that wherever you're running import-marc.sh has the right host information for solr.hosturl in import/import.properties.

This is the simplest. Install default-jre-headless (or equivalent), and either

• extract/clone VuFind to /usr/local/vufind2, or
• create that directory and copy vufind.sh and solr/ into it.

Now, since I would be remiss to tell you to run vufind.sh as root, make a user for it:

adduser --system --group --home /usr/local/vufind2/solr vf2solr
chown -R vf2solr:vf2solr /usr/local/vufind2/solr

and you can then start Solr with

sudo -u vf2solr /usr/local/vufind2/vufind.sh

You'll need to edit vufind.sh or otherwise prevent it from failing when it can't write to /dev/tty. Then:

cat >/etc/init.d/vf2solr <<END
#!/bin/sh
cd /usr/local/vufind2/solr
sudo -u vf2solr /usr/local/vufind2/vufind.sh "\$@"
END
chmod +x /etc/init.d/vf2solr
update-rc.d vf2solr defaults

At minimum, this involves something like:

• installing tomcat7 (or jetty8),
• linking solr.war into its webapps directory,
• chowning the solr directory to tomcat7 (or jetty8), and
• editing /etc/default/{tomcat7,jetty8} to point solr.solr.home at it.

You can create a more segregated directory structure with the following:

mkdir -p /usr/local/etc/solr/cores
cp solr/solr.xml /usr/local/etc/solr/solr.xml
cp -r solr/{authority,biblio,reserves,stats,website} /usr/local/etc/solr/cores
 
mkdir -p /var/local/lib/solr
cp -r solr/lib /usr/local/lib/solr
 
mkdir -p /usr/local/share/solr
ln -s /usr/local/etc/solr/solr.xml /usr/local/share/solr/solr.xml
ln -s /usr/local/etc/solr/cores /usr/local/share/solr/cores
ln -s /var/local/lib/solr /usr/local/share/solr/data
ln -s /usr/local/lib/solr /usr/local/share/solr/lib

The only thing to chown to tomcat7 (or jetty8) is /var/local/lib/solr. Then edit solr.xml appropriately, e.g.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
<solr persistent="false" sharedLib="lib">
  <cores adminPath="/admin/multicore">
    <core name="biblio" instanceDir="cores/biblio" dataDir="data/biblio" />
    <core name="authority" instanceDir="cores/authority" dataDir="data/authority" />
    <core name="stats" instanceDir="cores/stats" dataDir="data/stats" />
    <core name="reserves" instanceDir="cores/reserves" dataDir="data/reserves" />
    <core name="website" instanceDir="cores/website" dataDir="data/website" />
  </cores>
</solr>

and comment out the dataDir tags in /usr/local/etc/solr/cores/*/conf/solrconfig.xml.

Finally, (re)start Tomcat and make sure you're getting data directories for each of your cores under /var/local/lib/solr, and that links to administer your cores appear in the web interface (http://example.edu:8983/solr).

If you want to use upstream Solr, the relevant files are solr-$VERSION/dist/solr-$VERSION.war, for webapps/solr.war, and solr-$VERSION/contrib/analysis-extras/{lib,lucene-libs}/* for /usr/local/lib/solr.

Don't. A) it's probably too old (e.g. Ubuntu 14.04 ships 3.6.2), and B) if VuFind upgrades Solr you'll want to be able to upgrade with it.