Installing Apache Solr in Tomcat for Drupal on Snow Leopard

There's quite a few information available on how to install Apache Solr for your Drupal website. One of the best places to start is the Apache Solr Search Integration module documentation page. In this post I will gather all the bits and pieces for installing Solr in Tomcat on one specific platform: Snow Leopard. This is the platform I'm developing Drupal sites on and the great thing is it has all the needed Java stuff built in, so it's quite easy to install Solr and Tomcat. This method might work on some other systems too having Java 1.6 (with mostly some minor adjustments) but I've not tested this.

Install guide

• Download and install the Apache Solr Search Integration module.
• Download the Apache Solr PHP Client. As of the module requires revision 22.
  Extract this package and move the resulting folder to the module folder. You will now have something like [YOUR-MODULES-FOLDER]/apachesolr/SolrPhpClient/Apache/Solr/Service.php.
• Download Apache Solr. You might find a faster and newer version for your location on the downloads overview page.
  Extract this package and move it to a folder of your liking. I'm using ~/bin/apache-solr-1.4.0.
• Copy solrconfig.xml and schema.xml from the module folder to the Solr instance configuration folder. In my case this is in ~/bin/apache-solr-1.4.0/example/solr/conf. You might want to rename the schema and config file in that folder first to keep a backup.
• Download the core binary distribution of Apache Tomcat 6 (direct link for 6.0.24).
  Extract this package and move it to a folder of your liking. I'm using ~/bin/apache-tomcat-6.0.24.
• Copy the Solr web application~/bin/apache-solr-1.4.0/dist/apache-solr-1.4.0.war to your Tomcat webapps folder and rename it to solr.war. In my case this resulted in ~/bin/apache-tomcat-6.0.24/webapps/solr.war.
• Start and immediately shutdown Tomcat by running the following in your terminal (from your home folder):
  

  ~/bin/apache-tomcat-6.0.24/bin/startup.sh
  ~/bin/apache-tomcat-6.0.24/bin/shutdown.sh
  

  Note that the exact Tomcat folder name might depend on the Tomcat version you downloaded..
  This will unpack the war file resulting in a folder ~/bin/apache-tomcat-6.0.24/webapps/solr/.

• We now just have to point the Solr web application in Tomcat to the Solr example application. You can do this by adjusting the web application configuration file (WEB-INF/web.xml). Uncomment the section specifying the solr/home environment variable and set its value to the path of your Solr example application folder.
  
  In my case the configuration file was located at ~/bin/apache-tomcat-6.0.24/webapps/solr/WEB-INF/web.xml and after replacing the solr/home section I had.

  <env-entry>
     <env-entry-name>solr/home</env-entry-name>
     <env-entry-value>~/bin/apache-solr-1.4.0/example/solr</env-entry-value>
     <env-entry-type>java.lang.String</env-entry-type>
  </env-entry>
  

• Your system is now set up and you can start Tomcat now issueing the following command in your terminal.
  

  ~/bin/apache-tomcat-6.0.24/bin/startup.sh
  

• You can access the Solr admininstration interface now at http://localhost:8080/solr/admin/.