Question

I need to install Solr on Windows Server 2008 R2, and integrate it with a asp.net mvc3 application. I have tried to find the docs on how to install/setup solr on windows server, but found no good docs / help. Moreover, after install I want to integrate results into asp.net mvc3 applications, so a search query and results need to be displayed there. I’m also clue less how to do this. Although both the questions are little different, any suggestions / document that may help us getting started are truly welcome.

Answer 1

Here is the step by step procedure to get you started:

Step 1: Download Solr. It’s just a zip file.

Step 2: Copy from your SOLR_HOME_DIR/dist/apache-solr-1.3.0.war to your tomcat webapps directory: $CATALINA_HOME/webapps/solr.war – Note the war file name change. That’s important.

Step 3: Create your solr home directory at a location of your choosing. This is where the configuration for that solr install resides. The easiest way to do this is to copy the SOLR_HOME_DIR/examples/solr directory to wherever it is you want your solr home container to be. Say place it in C:\solr.

Step 4: Hope you have set your environment variables, if not then please set JAVA_HOME, JRE_HOME, CATALINA_OPTS, CATALINA_HOME. Note that CATALINA_HOME refers to your Tomcat directory & CATALINA_OPTS refers to the amount of heap memory you want to give to your Solr.

Step 5: Start tomcat. Note this is only necessary to allow tomcat to unpack your war file. If you look under $CATALINA_HOME/webapps there should now be a solr directory.

Step 6: Stop tomcat

Step 7: Go into that solr directory and edit WEB-INF/web.xml. Scroll down until you see an entry that looks like this:

<!-- People who want to hardcode their "Solr Home" directly into the 
     WAR File can set the JNDI property here... 
 --> 
<!-- 
  <env-entry> 
     <env-entry-name>solr/home</env-entry-name> 
     <env-entry-value>/Path/To/My/solr/Home/solr/</env-entry-value> 
     <env-entry-type>java.lang.String</env-entry-type> 
  </env-entry> 
--> 

Set your Solr home (for example: C:\solr) and uncomment the env entry.

Step 8: Start Tomcat again, and things should be going splendidly. You should be able to verify that solr is running by trying the url http://localhost:8080/solr/admin/.

The other answers here are good enough to get you integrate Solr with your ASP.Net & it should be pretty simple as Solr exposes HTTP.