Setting up an example Solr instance is not a hard task, at least when setting up the simplest configuration. The simplest way is to run the example provided with the Solr distribution, that shows how to use the embedded Jetty servlet container.
If you don't have any experience with Apache Solr, please refer to the Apache Solr tutorial which can be found at: http://lucene.apache.org/solr/tutorial.html before reading this book.
Tip
During the writing of this chapter, I used Solr version 4.0 and Jetty version 8.1.5, and those versions are covered in the tips of the following chapter. If another version of Solr is mandatory for a feature to run, then it will be mentioned.
We have a simple configuration, simple index structure described by the schema.xml file, and we can run indexing.
In this chapter you'll see how to configure and use the more advanced Solr modules; you'll see how to run Solr in different containers and how to prepare your configuration to different requirements. You will also learn how to set up a new SolrCloud cluster and migrate your current configuration to the one supporting all the features of SolrCloud. Finally, you will learn how to configure Solr cache to meet your needs and how to pre-sort your Solr indexes to be able to use early query termination techniques efficiently.