Creating a Solr collection

Learn how to create a collection so that you can start indexing data with Solr.

If you have enabled Ranger for authorization, you must have Solr Admin permission to be able to create collections.
Before you can create a Solr collection you need to generate a collection configuration using either a config or an instance directory.

If you are using Kerberos, kinit as a user with permission to create the collection:
```
kinit solradmin@[***EXAMPLE.COM***]
```
Replace [***EXAMPLE.COM***] with your Kerberos realm name.
On a host running a Solr server, make sure that the SOLR_ZK_ENSEMBLE environment variable is set in /etc/solr/conf/solr-env.sh. For example:
```
cat /etc/solr/conf/solr-env.sh
export SOLR_ZK_ENSEMBLE=zk01.example.com:2181,zk02.example.com:2181,zk03.example.com:2181/solr
```
This is automatically set on hosts with a Solr Server or Gateway role in Cloudera Manager.

Create a new collection using the following command:

solrctl collection --create [***COLLECTION NAME***] -s [***NUMBER OF SHARDS***] -c [***COLLECTION CONFIGURATION***]

where


`[*COLLECTION NAME*]`	User-defined name of the collection. note Although it is not currenly strictly enforced, you are strongly recommended to observe the following limitations on collection names: Use only ASCII alphanumeric characters (`A-Za-z0-9`), hyphen (`-`), or underscore (`_`). Avoid using the strings `shard` and `replica`.
`[*NUMBER OF SHARDS*]`	The number of shards you want to split your collection into.
`[*COLLECTION CONFIGURATION*]`	The name of an existing collection configuration.

For example:

solrctl collection --create logs -s 3 -c logs_config