Installing Solr and django-haystack on Ubuntu with OpenJDK

Install django-haystack

This part is easy – django-haystack is just a python module.

pip install django-haystack

Install OpenJDK and Solr

Solr is a Java program – we need the Java Runtime Environment to run our Solr server.

I’ll be using OpenJDK and solr-jetty on Ubuntu.

apt-get install openjdk-6-jre jetty solr-jetty 

Find and configure solr

$ find / -name "solr" 
/var/lib/solr
/var/lib/jetty/webapps/solr
/usr/share/solr
/etc/solr

Now that we know our solr config files live in /etc/solr/conf, have django-haystack generate the solr schema.xml file.

python manage.py build_solr_schema > /etc/solr/conf/schema.xml

Tweak solrconfig.xml

I’ll need to enable the MoreLikeThis handler by adding “” to the solrconfig.xml file.

Modify Jetty to run on port 8983 – default solr port

My jetty defaulted to port 8080 – a port I commonly use for other projects (nginx -> apache). Also, the default solr port is 8983 which my development environment uses. We’ll need to update jetty to use a different port.

I found the config file by searching for the jetty folder (/etc/jetty/jetty.xml) – modify the “port” line to whatever port you have set in your django settings HAYSTACK_SOLR_URL

<Set name="port"><SystemProperty name="jetty.port" default="8983"/></Set> 

Start jetty

Navigate to your jetty folder, and run.

$ java -jar /usr/share/jetty/start.jar

Build your solr indexes

Now we need some data to search against.
Assuming you’ve set up django-haystack, run the rebuild_index management command.

$ python manage.py rebuild_index

Set up cron job to rebuild indexes however often you need

$ crontab -e
$  0 0 * * * python manage.py update_index --age=24 --remove