Apache Solr Container (Built with Ansible)

This project is composed of three main parts:

• Ansible project: This project is maintained on GitHub: geerlingguy/solr-container. Please file issues, support requests, etc. against this GitHub repository.
• Docker Hub Image: If you just want to use the geerlingguy/solr Docker image in your project, you can pull it from Docker Hub.
• Ansible Role: If you need a flexible Ansible role that's compatible with both traditional servers and containerized builds, check out geerlingguy.solr on Ansible Galaxy. (This is the Ansible role that does the bulk of the work in managing the Apache Solr container.)

Versions

Currently maintained versions include:

• 9.x, 9.4.1, latest: Apache Solr 9.x
• 8.x, 8.11.2: Apache Solr 8.x
• 7.x, 7.7.3: Apache Solr 7.x

Standalone Usage

If you want to use the geerlingguy/solr image from Docker Hub, you don't need to install or use this project at all. You can quickly build a Solr container locally with:

docker run -d --name=solr -p 8983:8983 geerlingguy/solr:latest /opt/solr/bin/solr start -p 8983 -f -force

You can also wrap up that configuration in a Dockerfile and/or a docker-compose.yml file if you want to keep things simple. For example:

```
version: "3"

services:
  solr:
    image: geerlingguy/solr:latest
    container_name: solr
    ports:
      - "8983:8983"
    restart: always
    # See 'Custom and Persistent Solr cores' for instructions for volumes.
    volumes: []
    command: ["/opt/solr/bin/solr", "start", "-p", "8983", "-f", "-force"]

Then run:

docker-compose up -d

Now you should be able to access the Solr admin dashboard at http://localhost:8983/.

Custom and Persistent Solr cores

The default installation includes a collection1 core in the SOLR_HOME directory, /var/solr.

Apache Solr will autodiscover any Solr cores in SOLR_HOME by searching for core.properties files inside each subdirectory. A standard convention for a single Solr core is to to mount a host directory as a volume with the core directory, containing the core's conf, data, and core.properties files.

Here's an example minimal core.properties file, for a core named mysearch:

name=mysearch
config=solrconfig.xml
schema=schema.xml
dataDir=data

So, if you have a solr core directory named mysearch (with a mysearch/core.properties file inside, and a conf and data directory for storing Solr configuration and index data, respectively), which looks like this:

mysearch_conf/
├── conf
│   ├── elevate.xml
│   ├── mapping-ISOLatin1Accent.txt
│   ├── protwords.txt
│   ├── _rest_managed.json
│   ├── schema_extra_fields.xml
│   ├── schema_extra_types.xml
│   ├── schema.xml
│   ├── solrconfig_extra.xml
│   ├── solrconfig.xml
│   ├── solrcore.properties
│   ├── stopwords.txt
│   └── synonyms.txt
├── core.properties
└── data

Mount it as a volume like -v ./mysearch:/var/solr/mysearch:rw. If you have multiple solr cores (all defined inside a cores directory), mount them inside a cores directory like -v ./cores:/var/solr/cores.

Or, if using a Docker Compose file:

services:
  solr:
    ...
    volumes:
      # If you have one core:
      - ./mysearch:/var/solr/mysearch:rw
      # If you have multiple cores:
      - ./cores:/var/solr/cores:rw

You can also mount volumes from a data container or elsewhere; the key is you will be able to both provide custom Solr configuration (schema.xml, solrconfig.xml, etc.), and also have a persistent data directory that lives outside the container.

Management with Ansible

Prerequisites

Before using this project to build and maintain a Solr images for Docker, you need to have the following installed:

• Docker Community Edition (for Mac, Windows, or Linux)
• Ansible

Build the image

First, install Ansible role requirements:

ansible-galaxy install -r requirements.yml

Then, make sure Docker is running, and run the playbook to build the container:

ansible-playbook --extra-vars="@vars/7.x.yml" main.yml

(Substitute whatever supported Solr version you desire in the vars path) Once the image is built, you can run docker images to see the solr image that was generated.

Note: If you get an error like Failed to import docker, run pip install docker.

Push the image to Docker Hub

See the .github/workflows/build.yml file in this repository for how it pushes all the tagged images automatically on any commit to the master branch.

License

MIT / BSD

Author Information

This container build was created in 2017 by Jeff Geerling, author of Ansible for DevOps.