To follow along with this tutorial, you will need…

1. Java 1.5 or greater. Some places you can get it are from Sun, IBM, or BEA.
   Running java -version at the command line should indicate a version number starting with 1.5.
2. A Solr release.
3. FireFox or Mozilla is the preferred browser to view the admin pages, as the current stylesheet doesn’t look good on Internet Explorer.

Please run the browser showing this tutorial and the Solr server on the same machine so tutorial links will correctly point to your Solr server. Begin by unziping the Solr release and changing your working directory to be the “example” directory. (Note that the base directory name may vary with the version of Solr downloaded.)

chrish@asimov:~solr$ ls
solr-nightly.zip
chrish@asimov:~solr$ unzip -q solr-nightly.zip
chrish@asimov:~solr$ cd solr-nightly/example/

Solr can run in any Java Servlet Container of your choice, but to simplify this tutorial, the example index includes a small installation of Jetty. In order to compile JSPs, this version of Jetty requires that you run “java” from a JDK, not from a JRE.

To launch Jetty with the Solr WAR, and the example configs, just run the start.jar …

chrish@asimov:~/solr/example$ java -jar start.jar
1 [main] INFO org.mortbay.log - Logging to org.slf4j.impl.SimpleLogger@1f436f5 via org.mortbay.log.Slf4jLog
334 [main] INFO org.mortbay.log - Extract jar:file:/home/chrish/solr/example/webapps/solr.war!/ to /tmp/Jetty__solr/webapp
Feb 24, 2006 5:54:52 PM org.apache.solr.servlet.SolrServlet init
INFO: user.dir=/home/chrish/solr/example
Feb 24, 2006 5:54:52 PM org.apache.solr.core.SolrConfig <clinit>
INFO: Loaded Config solrconfig.xml

...

1656 [main] INFO org.mortbay.log - Started SelectChannelConnector @ 0.0.0.0:8983

This will start up the Jetty application server on port 8983, and use your terminal to display the logging information from Solr.

You can see that the Solr is running by loading http://localhost:8983/solr/admin/ in your web browser. This is the main starting point for Administering Solr