This chapter covers
- Downloading and installing Apache Solr 4.7
- Starting the example Solr server
- Sorting, paging, and results formatting
- Exploring the Solritas example search UI
It’s natural to have a sense of unease when you start using an unfamiliar technology, but you can put your mind at ease with Solr, because it is designed to be easy to install and use out of the box. In the spirit of being agile, you can start out with the basics and incrementally add complexity to your Solr configuration. For example, Solr allows you to split a large index into smaller subsets, called shards, and add replicas to increase your capacity to serve queries. But you don’t need to worry about index sharding or replication until you run into scale issues.
By the end of this chapter, you’ll have Solr running on your computer, know how to start and stop Solr, know your way around the web-based administration console, and have a basic understanding of key Solr terminology such as Solr home, core, and collection.