Use the solrctl utility to manage a SolrCloud deployment, completing tasks such as manipulating SolrCloud collections, SolrCloud collection instance directories, and individual cores.

A SolrCloud collection is the top level object for indexing documents and providing a query interface. Each SolrCloud collection must be associated with an instance directory, though note that different collections can use the same instance directory. Each SolrCloud collection is typically replicated (also known as sharded) among several SolrCloud instances. Each replica is called a SolrCloud core and is assigned to an individual SolrCloud node. The assignment process is managed automatically, though users can apply fine-grained control over each individual core using the core command. A typical deployment workflow with solrctl consists of deploying ZooKeeper coordination service, deploying solr-server daemons to each node, initializing the state of the ZooKeeper coordination service using init command, starting each solr-server daemon, generating an instance directory, uploading it to ZooKeeper, and associating a new collection with the name of the instance directory.

In general, if an operation succeeds, solrctl exits silently with a success exit code. If an error occurs, solrctl prints a diagnostics message combined with a failure exit code.

You can execute solrctl on any node that is configured as part of the SolrCloud. To execute any solrctl command on a node outside of SolrCloud deployment, ensure that SolrCloud nodes are reachable and provide --zk and --solr command line options.

The solrctl commands init, instancedir, collection, core, and cluster affect the entire SolrCloud deployment and are executed only once per required operation.

The solrctl core command affects a single SolrCloud node.

If you are using solrctl to manage your deployment in an environment that requires Kerberos authentication, you must have a valid Kerberos ticket, which you can get using kinit.