# Installing Solr

In this post I will show how to install Solr to use it as search engine for a blog website.

Solr has a couple installation possibilities. There's the classic manual installation and also the possibility to run it in a Docker container. I believe going through with the Docker installation is better in the long term, as it leaves more options open to choose a Cloud provider - I could choose a VPS or run it directly in a containerized Cloud environment. In addition, once done the setup if I need to deploy it to different environments I won't need to repeat all the manual installation work. ## Docker First I focused on setting up the development environment. I do this for fun, so I don't want to have to struggle everytime I try to code something. It has to be smooth and simple to run, still giving me access to all the benefits of Next development process (mainly HMR - Hot Module Replacement). To do the set up of the environment (both for development and for production) I decided to go with Docker Compose because it's a technology I had already used in the past a bit, and I know that I can get all the environment up and running by just typing: {`docker compose up`} ### Set up The setup is very simple. I just followed the instructions on how to deploy using Docker available in the NextJS docs. I used the multi environment example provided to set up 2 environments: - A development environment to use in my laptop. - A production environment that is the one I will use when I want to do the deployment to GCP. To be able to use the Dockerfile provided I had to modify my *next.config.js* file to add \{ "output": "standalone" \} to the *module.exports* of the file. In this post I'm focusing only on the development environment. I'll later publish another article for how to deploy the whole application to production. I modified the example provided to add a network separation between the FE and the BE and the container where solar will run. This is the result: {`version: '2' services: next: build: context: ../../ dockerfile: docker/development/next/Dockerfile image: noart/next ports: - "80:3000" - "443:3000" networks: - frontend - backend solr: build: context: ../../ dockerfile: docker/development/solr/Dockerfile image: noart/solr ports: - "8983:8983" volumes: - data:/var/solr networks: - backend volumes: data: networks: frontend: {} backend: {} `} Logically, the context and dockerfile paths are relative to the project root directory and where the *docker-compose.yml* file is located. The structure of the project is available in my GitHub (notice that if you read this some time after its publication I may have added or changed some things). ## Installation After the *docker-compose.yml* file is done, the next step is to build the container image for Solr. To do this, I am going to use the official base image provided by the Solr project. Solr has a feature called *configsets* by which it can load predefined configurations for a given core. These sets go in the Solr home folder by default and can be used to let different cores share configuration. For now, I'll just copy the default files from Solr (so I can later modify them) and put them inside a folder next to the Dockerfile called *config*, following the structure specified in the Configsets Documentation. The default configuration files can be found in Solr's GitHub. Just the following two are needed to understand how Solr works: - solrconfig.xml - managed-schema.xml Once this is done, I can write the *Dockerfile* and copy the just added files to the image. I also take the opportunity to specify the necessary command to start solr and create a core. The Solr command is defined in the *ENTRYPOINT*, so with the *CMD* instruction I can define the parameters to be passed - Docker reference. {`FROM solr:slim WORKDIR /var/solr/data RUN mkdir -p configsets/blog-configset/conf COPY docker/development/solr/config/ ./configsets/blog-configset/conf # add as last parameter "configsets/blog-configset" when the custom configuration is ready CMD ["solr-precreate", "posts"] `} ## Conclusion And like this I have a running NextJS container and another one with Solr. Even with the default configuration, Solr will work well for most use cases. This article has been short, but it sets everything ready to start tweaking the configuration of Solr and understanding how this search engine works, which I'll write about in the future (hopefully not a far away one). Until next time!

Posts