Deploying Solr

Nomisma requires Apache Solr to power its public user interface. At the time of the publication of these instructions, the current version of Solr is 9.9.0. Within /usr/local/projects/nomisma/ ($NOMISMA_HOME), you will find a solr-home folder. Inside solr-home are folders that correspond to the Solr schema version, 1.6 and 1.7. The 1.7 folder includes configurations current to Solr 9.x (2025).

The following instructions are for modern versions of Solr that run as a separate start-up service (by default, under port 8983) rather than a Tomcat WAR file (discontinued following Solr 4.10 in 2016). $NOMISMA_HOME/solr-home/1.7 contains a conf folder. Conf includes all of the configuration files necessary for that particular version of Solr. The schema.xml file contains a list of fields necessary for text searching in Nomisma, faceting browsing, mapping, and other such queries. By default, Solr outputs JSON, but the solrconfig.xml has been changed to output XML to avoid significant rewriting of XSLT throughout Nomisma.

Important: In 1.7 (or different schema version numbers), create a “data” folder and assign permissions which will grant the Solr service write access. When following the instructions below to set up Solr as a start-up service, a 'solr' user will be given write access to these folders.

Download and Install

1. Download the latest version of Solr
2. Unzip to the filesystem and follow Solr's documentation to establish Solr as a start-up web service on the server, which by default will install Solr to /opt/solr and will create /var/solr as a separate directory for indexed data.
3. In Solr 9.x Solr needs write access to directories that are symlinked in $SOLR_HOME. Edit vi /etc/default/solr.in.sh and set SOLR_SECURITY_MANAGER_ENABLED=false (and comment the line). Restart Solr after making the change.

Create Nomisma Solr Core

1. Make Solr folders in Nomisma writeable by the user bound to the Solr web service: sudo chown -R solr:solr /usr/local/projects/nomisma/solr-home/1.7/
2. Navigate to /var/solr/data and create a symlink in order to create a core for Nomisma: ln -s /usr/local/projects/nomisma/solr-home/1.7/ nomisma
3. Log into the Solr administrative panel, http://servername:8983, and navigate to the Core Admin Tab. Create a new core named nomisma with an instanceDir of nomisma, a dataDir of data (relative path to the instanceDir), config of solrconfig.xml and schema of schema.xml.
4. This will now activate a core for Nomisma accessible at http://servername:8983/solr/nomisma/.