Generating Collection Configuration

To start using Solr and indexing data, you must configure a collection to hold the index.

A collection requires the following configuration files:

  • solrconfig.xml
  • schema.xml
  • Any additional files referenced in the xml files

The solrconfig.xml file contains all of the Solr settings for a given collection, and the schema.xml file specifies the schema that Solr uses when indexing documents. For more details on how to configure a collection, see http://wiki.apache.org/solr/SchemaXml.

Configuration files for a collection are contained in a directory called an instance directory. To generate a template instance directory, run the following command:
solrctl instancedir --generate $HOME/solr_configs

You can customize a collection by directly editing the solrconfig.xml and schema.xml files created in $HOME/solr_configs/conf.

After completing the configuration, you can make it available to Solr by running the following command, which uploads the contents of the instance directory to ZooKeeper:
solrctl instancedir --create <collection_name> $HOME/solr_configs
Use the solrctl utility to verify that your instance directory uploaded successfully and is available to ZooKeeper. List the uploaded instance directories as follows:
solrctl instancedir --list

For example, if you used the --create command to create a collection named weblogs, the --list command should return weblogs.