Setting up an example for a Solr instance is not a hard task. We have all that is provided with the Solr distribution package, which we need for the example deployment. In fact, this is the simplest way to run Solr. It is very convenient for local development because you don't need any additional software, apart from Java, which is already installed and you can control when to run Solr and easily change its configuration. However, the example instance of Solr will probably not be the optimized way in terms of your deployment. For example, the default cache configurations are most likely not good for your deployment; there are only sample warming queries that don't reflect your production queries, there are field types you don't need, and so on. This is why I will show a few configuration-related recipes in this chapter.
Note
If you don't have any experience with Apache Solr, refer to the Apache Solr tutorial, which can be found at http://lucene.apache.org/solr/tutorial.html, before reading this book. You can also check articles regarding Solr on http://solr.pl and http://blog.sematext.com.
This chapter focuses on Solr configuration. It starts with showing you how to set up Solr, install ZooKeeper for SolrCloud, migrate your old master-slave configuration to a SolrCloud deployment, and also covers some more advanced topics such as near real-time indexing and searching. We will also go through tuning Solr for specific use cases and the configurations of some more advanced functionality, such as the scoring algorithm.