Apache Solr

There are rare occasions when you want to re-index all your site's content in Solr. Such occasions include:

• Major Drupal version upgrade (e.g. from Drupal 6.x to Drupal 7.x).
• Changing your Solr schema to include more search criteria.
• Upgrading your Solr server to a new major version.
• Moving your Solr server from an old server to a new one.

Most of high traffic or complex Drupal sites use Apache Solr as the search engine. It is much faster and more scaleable than Drupal's search module.

In a previous article on Drupal with Apache Solr 4.x, we described one way to install the latest stable Apache Solr 4.x. That article detailed a lot of manual steps involving downloading, extracting, setting permissions, creating a startup script, ...etc.

Most of high traffic or complex Drupal sites use Apache Solr as the search engine. It is much faster and more scaleable than Drupal's search module.

In this article, we describe one way of many for having a working Apache Solr installation for use with Drupal 7.x, on Ubunutu Server 12.04 LTS. The technique described should work with Ubunut 14.04 LTS as well.