Installing and getting Solr up and running is straight forward, as long as you follow these simple steps. I ran into problems myself trying to get Solr starting up under Tomcat, even after reading several posts explaining how to, which is why I wrote this post, explaining all the necessary steps. Feel free to make a comment, if you have any questions or run into problems.
1. Download Apache Tomcat from Apache Software Foundation. I downloaded and installed Tomcat 7.0.42 “32-bit/64-bit Windows Service Installer” under the location c:\Tomcat\
2. Download the latest version of “Solr”. I downloaded Solr 4.4.0.
– Open solr-4.4.0.zip, navigate to \example\solr and extract the directories and files to c:\solr\, so it contains; bin, collection1, README.txt, solr.xml and zoo.cfg
– Again in solr-4.4.0.zip navigate to \example\lib and extract all the jar-files into c:\Tomcat\lib\. Repeat the same procedure with the jar-files in \examples\lib\ext.
– In solr-4.4.0.zip navigate to \example\webapps and extract solr.war to c:\Tomcat\webapps\. If the file is called solr-versionNumber.war, rename it to solr.war
3. In C:\Tomcat\conf\Catalina\localhost create a file called “solr.xml” with following content, where you specify Solr docBase “c:/Tomcat/webapps/solr.war” and enviroment value “/Tomcat/webapps/”.
[xml]
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<context docBase="c:/Tomcat/webapps/solr.war" debug="0" crossContext="true" >
<environment name="solr/home" type="java.lang.String" value="/Tomcat/webapps/" override="true"></environment>
</context>
[/xml]
4. Open up C:\Tomcat\webapps\solr\WEB-INF\web.xml and uncomment the following and replace “/put/your/solr/home/here” with your solr location
[xml]
<env-entry>
<env-entry-name>solr/home</env-entry-name>
<env-entry-value>C:\Solr</env-entry-value>
<env-entry-type>java.lang.String</env-entry-type>
</env-entry>
[/xml]
During these steps you might have to stop and start your Apache Tomcat to be able to write to the files and reload the changes. To stop/start Apache Tomcat, click the Apache icon in the task bar and click “Stop service / Start service”.
You should now be able to navigate to http://localhost:8080/solr/ and get the Solr admin site, presuming you installed Apache Tomcat on port 8080 (as per default)
If you run into problems, you can view the Catalina log located in c:\Tomcat\logs\catalina.date.log.