Local setup of Solr and querying using solr R package, on Mac OSX

This material is based on this blog post: http://risnandar.wordpress.com/2013/09/08/how-to-install-and-setup-apache-lucene-solr-in-osx/

  1. If you don't have homebrew installed, install homebrew by doing “. If you have homebrew skip to step 2.
  2. Install solr by doing brew install solr. This installed solr v.4.5.1
  3. Navigate in your terminal to an example Solr database: cd /usr/local/Cellar/solr/4.5.1/libexec/example/
  4. Start solr: java -jar start.jar
  5. Navigate in your browser to http://localhost:8983/solr/#/
  6. Navigate in your terminal to cd /usr/local/Cellar/solr/4.5.1/libexec/example/exampledocs/, then execute ./post.sh vidcard.xml in that directory. This inserts some data into the example database.

Try this query in your browser: http://localhost:8983/solr/select?q=:&wt=json

And we can now use the solr R package to query the Solr database to get raw JSON data:

url <- 'http://localhost:8983/solr/select'
solr_search(q='*:*', base=url, raw=TRUE)

[1] "{\"responseHeader\":{\"status\":0,\"QTime\":1,\"params\":{\"start\":\"0\",
\"q\":\"*:*\",\"wt\":\"json\"}},\"response\":{\"numFound\":2,\"start\":0,\"docs\"
:[{\"id\":\"EN7800GTX/2DHTV/256M\",\"name\":\"ASUS Extreme N7800GTX/2DHTV (256 MB)\"
,\"manu\":\"ASUS Computer Inc.\",\"manu_id_s\":\"asus\",\"cat\":[\"electronics\",
\"graphics card\"],\"features\":[\"NVIDIA GeForce 7800 GTX GPU/VPU clocked at 486MHz\"
,\"256MB GDDR3 Memory clocked at 1.35GHz\",\"PCI Express x16\",\"Dual DVI connectors, 
HDTV out, video input\",\"OpenGL 2.0, DirectX 9.0\"],\"weight\":16.0,\"price\":479.95,
\"price_c\":\"479.95,USD\",\"popularity\":7,\"store\":\"40.7143,-74.006\",\"inStock\"
:false,\"manufacturedate_dt\":\"2006-02-13T00:00:00Z\",\"_version_\":1455773551158099968},
{\"id\":\"100-435805\",\"name\":\"ATI Radeon X1900 XTX 512 MB PCIE Video Card\",\"manu\"
:\"ATI Technologies\",\"manu_id_s\":\"ati\",\"cat\":[\"electronics\",\"graphics card\"],
\"features\":[\"ATI RADEON X1900 GPU/VPU clocked at 650MHz\",\"512MB GDDR3 SDRAM 
clocked at 1.55GHz\",\"PCI Express x16\",\"dual DVI, HDTV, svideo, composite out\",
\"OpenGL 2.0, DirectX 9.0\"],\"weight\":48.0,\"price\":649.99,\"price_c\":\"649.99,
USD\",\"popularity\":7,\"inStock\":false,\"manufacturedate_dt\":\"2006-02-13T00:00:00Z\",
\"store\":\"40.7143,-74.006\",\"_version_\":1455773551214723072}]}}\n"
attr(,"class")
[1] "sr_search"
attr(,"wt")
[1] "json"

Or parsed data to a data.frame (just looking at a few columns for brevity):

solr_search(q='*:*', base=url)[,c(1:3)]

                    id                                        name               manu
1 EN7800GTX/2DHTV/256M        ASUS Extreme N7800GTX/2DHTV (256 MB) ASUS Computer Inc.
2           100-435805 ATI Radeon X1900 XTX 512 MB PCIE Video Card   ATI Technologies

Local setup of Solr on Windows and Linux

I'm a Mac user, so I'm not too familiar with Windows and Linux, but will get to this soon, or send a pull request with instructions in this file.