How To Install Apache Solr 8.9 on CentOS/RHEL 8

Apache Solr is an open-source search platform written on Java. Solr provides full-text search, spell suggestions, custom document ordering and ranking, Snippet generation, and highlighting. Solr handles a variety of data types out of the box, including JSON, XML, many Office documents, CSV, and more. At the time of writing this tutorial, Solr 8.9.0 is the latest version available for installation.

This tutorial will help you to install Apache Solr 8.5 on CentOS/RHEL 8 systems.

Prerequisites

We assume you already have shell access to your CentOS/RHEL 8 system with a sudo privilege account. For remote systems, log in with the SSH client.

Step 1 – Install Java

The latest version of Apache Solr required Java 8 or greater version to run. Make sure your system fulfills the Java requirements on your system. If not run the following command to install Java.

sudo dnf install java-11-openjdk 

Then check installed Java version:

java -version

openjdk version "11.0.4" 2019-07-16 LTS
OpenJDK Runtime Environment 18.9 (build 11.0.4+11-LTS)
OpenJDK 64-Bit Server VM 18.9 (build 11.0.4+11-LTS, mixed mode, sharing)

Step 2 - Install Apache Solr on CentOS 8

Now download the required Solr version from its official site or mirrors. You may also use the below command to download Apache Solr 8.5.2 from its official website. After that extract the installer script.

cd /tmp 
wget https://downloads.apache.org/lucene/solr/8.9.0/solr-8.9.0.tgz
sudo tar xzf solr-8.9.0.tgz solr-8.9.0/bin/install_solr_service.sh --strip-components=2

Then execute the installer script with bash shell followed with downloaded Archive file. The command will be like below:

sudo bash ./install_solr_service.sh solr-8.9.0.tgz 

This will create an account named solr on your system and finish the installation process. After that start the service default Solr port 8983.

Step 3 - Manage Solr Service

Apache Solr service is managed under systemd services. Use the following commands to Start, Stop and check the status of the Solr service.

sudo systemctl stop solr 
sudo systemctl start solr  
sudo systemctl status solr 

Step 4 - Create New Solr Collection

A collection is the group of cores that together form a single logical index. A collection has a different set of configuration files and schema definitions than other collections. You can create a collection by running the following command:

sudo su - solr -c "/usr/local/solr/bin/solr create -c mycol1 -n data_driven_schema_configs"

Sample output:

Created new core 'mycol1'

Step 5 - Access Solr Admin Panel

By default, the Solr server runs on port 8983. Access Solr dashboard in your web browser using server ip address or hostname with 8983 port.

  http://demo.tecadmin.net:8983/

Here you can view statics of created collection in previous steps named "mycol1". Click on "Core Selector" on the left sidebar and select created collection.

Conclusion

In this tutorial, you have learned to install Apache Solr on CentOS/RHEL 8 system. Also created a new collection in Solr server.