Installing Solr on Ubuntu Jaunty 9.04

Solr install success on Ubuntu Jaunty 9.04

I just installed Apache Solr on Ubuntu Jaunty 9.04. I am not a Java or Tomcat person, so it was all rather new and a confusing, there was no good install guide and I hit a few walls, so here are some pointers that should get you to a working install.

I am using the command-line install method, so it’s works for desktop and server editions. You can skip the apt-gets and use Synaptics Package Manager to install the packages if you prefer.

1) Install Java

sudo apt-get install sun-java6-bin sun-java6-demo sun-java6-jdk sun-java6-jre

I believe the default install of Jaunty installs openjdk java, so you will want to make sure that Sun Java is chosen:

sudo update-alternatives --config java

You will prompted to pick a version as the default:

Select the Sun Java version

Edit /etc/profile to sent the JAVA_HOME environment variable:

JAVA_HOME=/usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun
export JAVA_HOME

2) Install Tomcat

sudo apt-get install tomcat5.5 libtomcat5.5-java tomcat5.5-admin tomcat5.5-webapps

Check that Tomcat is running:

sudo service tomcat5.5 status

Grant yourself Tomcat Manager and Admin permissions; edit /usr/share/tomcat5.5/conf/tomcat-users.xml and include the following:

<user username="myname" password="mypassword" roles="admin,manager"/>

3 Install Solr

sudo apt-get install solr-common solr-tomcat5.5 libxpp3-java

(I kept getting “java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: org/xmlpull/v1/XmlPullParserException at java.lang.Class.forName0(Native Method)” in the Solr admin page; a little searching led me to find that the problems was that libxpp3-java was not installed. Why it’s not a required package, I don’t know!)

4) Restart Tomcat and Test Solr

sudo service tomcat5.5 restart

Now you can go to the Tomcat web admin page at http://localhost:8180/ and login with the credentials you supplied above.

Go to http://localhost:8180/solr/ and do a test query to confirm it’s working.

Of course you will get zero results, you have no content indexed yet.

That should be enough to get started!