Deploying Acts as Solr on Tomcat with Rails

At Radio NZ we have a number of small Rails applications that need really good search. In several cases we want field-based searching.

e.g. title:"A Blog Post"

to look only in the field 'title' for "A Blog Post".

Apache Solr is:

"an open source enterprise search server based on the Lucene Java search library, with XML/HTTP and JSON APIs, hit highlighting, faceted search, caching, replication, a web administration interface and many more features."

Acts as Solr is plugin for Rails that provides a Rails interface to Solr. The plugin includes Solr, and provides rake tasks to start, stop and reindex the Solr index.

This works fine in development, but gets tricky in production. If you have several apps, it does not really make sense to have several instances of Solr running on the same server (and you have to change the port number for each so they don't clash). There is also the question of how to ensure Solr restarts if the server reboots.

Because of this I decided to run the production instance of Solr in a Tomcat container. Each app has there own index on the development machine, and when deployed the solr.yml file tells each app to use the single Slor/Tomcat instance instead.

We use Debian Lenny on our production server. You should read these instructions first. Twice. They work for Lenny, and only a few minor tweaks are required to adapt them for Acts as Solr.

The first thing is to use the version of Solr that comes with the plugin - it has changes in the config files that make it work correctly with the plugin. I found this out the hard way.

Deploy your Rails app first and install Tomcat as outlined above. Then do this:

sudo cp path/to/your/app/vendor/plugins/acts_as_solr/solr/webapps/solr.war /usr/local/tomcat6/webapps/solr.war

sudo cp -r path/to/your/app/vendor/plugins/acts_as_solr/solr/solr /usr/local/tomcat6/solr/

Then carry on with the rest of the recipe and you are done.