How to start Solr automatically?

Question

At the moment I have to go to /usr/java/apache-solr-1.4.0/example and then do:

java -jar start.jar

How do I get this to start

Answer 1

There are three steps that you need to do here:

1. Create the script, make it executable, and put it in the right place.
2. Make the script start up properly on reboot.
3. Bonus: Set up a logrotation script so logs don't get out of control.

For number one, I've tuned supermagic's script from above. It was OK, but had a number of typos, lacked some functionality (status, restart), didn't use the daemon utility very effectively.

Here's my version of the script (make sure you have daemon installed for it to work):

#!/bin/sh

# Prerequisites:
# 1. Solr needs to be installed at /usr/local/solr/example
# 2. daemon needs to be installed
# 3. Script needs to be executed by root

# This script will launch Solr in a mode that will automatically respawn if it
# crashes. Output will be sent to /var/log/solr/solr.log. A pid file will be 
# created in the standard location.

start () {
    echo -n "Starting solr..."

    # start daemon
    daemon --chdir='/usr/local/solr/example' --command "java -jar start.jar" --respawn --output=/var/log/solr/solr.log --name=solr --verbose

    RETVAL=$?
    if [ $RETVAL = 0 ]
    then
        echo "done."
    else
        echo "failed. See error code for more information."
    fi
    return $RETVAL
}

stop () {
    # stop daemon
    echo -n "Stopping solr..."

    daemon --stop --name=solr  --verbose
    RETVAL=$?

    if [ $RETVAL = 0 ]
    then
        echo "done."
    else
        echo "failed. See error code for more information."
    fi
    return $RETVAL
}


restart () {
    daemon --restart --name=solr  --verbose
}


status () {
    # report on the status of the daemon
    daemon --running --verbose --name=solr
    return $?
}


case "$1" in
    start)
        start
    ;;
    status)
        status
    ;;
    stop)
        stop
    ;;
    restart)
        restart
    ;;
    *)
        echo $"Usage: solr {start|status|stop|restart}"
        exit 3
    ;;
esac

exit $RETVAL

Place this script at /etc/init.d/solr, make it executable, and you should be good with step one. You can now start/stop/restart/status a solr daemon with /etc/init.d/solr start|stop|restart|status

For step two, run the following on an Ubuntu machine (don't know about Redhat):

update-rc.d solr defaults

Once this is done, you're in pretty good shape, but you probably want to rotate the logs properly at some point, so here's a good config for the logs:

/var/log/solr/*.log {
  weekly
  rotate 12
  compress
  delaycompress
  create 640 root root
  postrotate
    /etc/init.d/solr restart
  endscript
}

Place that file in /etc/logrotate.d/solr, and you should be good to go, assuming logrotate is running (it usually is).