Running Solr on Debian with Tomcat

Posted on December 2nd, 2007 by Yousef Ourabi

SOLR, “Searching On Lucene with Replication” which started out life at CNET, before it was released to the open source community comes with a solid example configuration using the Jetty embeded servlet container.

Getting SOLR running on Debian GNU/Linux with Tomcat in production environments can be a tad tricker. If you just unpacked the dist/solr.war into your webapps directory you probably saw some non descriptive error like: “FAIL - Application at context path /apache-solr-1.2.0 could not be started”, or something like the following in your localhost log:

SEVERE: Exception starting filter SolrRequestFilter
java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: Could not initialize class org.apache.solr.core.SolrConfig
at org.apache.solr.servlet.SolrDispatchFilter.init(SolrDispatchFilter.java:74)

There are two things that can really bite you

1)  Not having a Context declaration to set SOLR/HOME via JNDI

Make sure a file exists under conf/Catalina/localhost with the name of the web-app you want to use say for example “solr” would be solr.xml — here are its contents:

<Context docBase=”/home/java/apache-solr-1.2.0.war” debug=”0″ crossContext=”true” >
<Environment name=”solr/home” type=”java.lang.String” value=”/tmp/solr/home” override=”true” />
</Context>

2) Running tomcat with security policies enabled

Edit /etc/default/tomcat5.5 and change #TOMCAT_SECURITY=yes to TOMCAT_SECURITY=no (Note: Remove the HASH to un-comment this configuration setting)

This got me running on Debian Etch — hope this helps.

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Filed under: Programming


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2 Responses to “Running Solr on Debian with Tomcat”

  1. albert ramstedt, on January 18th, 2008 at 11:11 am Said:

    If you do not want to completely disable the security manager, you can put this in catalina.policy or policy.d/50user.policy in your tomcat directory:

    grant codeBase “file:${catalina.home}/webapps/solr/-” {
    permission java.security.AllPermission;
    };

  2. yourabi, on January 18th, 2008 at 5:36 pm Said:

    Albert,
    Thanks for the tip — will be a big help.

    I had meant to take a closer look at the policy settings but never got around to it.

    Thanks again,
    Yousef

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