Ansible role for installing multicore Apache Solr

This playbook is based on a great tutorial written by 2bits.

http://2bits.com/articles/configuring-apache-solr-4x-drupal-password-authentication.html

Thanks guys!

Disclaimer

Even if the script does some security related configuration I don't guarantee that your Solr instance or your server will be secure. You have ensure this yourself. Read the license!

Provides

• Ansible playbook for running the role
• Closest mirror fetching for Solr
• Editable settings including
  • Solr version (default: 4.7.2)
  • System level user name
  • Installation path
  • Configuring core names and types (default/drupal)
• Support for Drupal's Solr modules (apachesolr/search_api_solr)
  • Solr version 4.x only
  • Config files are fetched from search_api_solr/solr-conf/4.x
• Vagrantfile for testing and development
• Ansible hosts file that points to the Vagrant box

Requires

• Ansible (tested on 1.6)
  • http://docs.ansible.com/intro_installation.html
• Ubuntu (tested on 12.04 LTS)
• Vagrant (optional, tested on 1.5.1)
  • https://docs.vagrantup.com/v2/getting-started/index.html

Usage - Vagrant

1. Clone the repository
2. Cd to the cloned folder and run:

$ vagrant up

3. Run

$ ansible-playbook -i hosts play.yml --private-key=~/.vagrant.d/insecure_private_key

4. After the script is run wait for a while for Apache Solr to start
5. Navigate to http://192.168.56.107:8983/solr with your browser

Usage - Remote server

1. Clone the repository
2. Cd to the cloned folder
3. Edit the hosts inventory file to point to your server
   • See http://docs.ansible.com/intro_inventory.html
4. Change the remote_user in the play.yml file
5. Run

$ ansible-playbook -i hosts play.yml ...

• You'll probably need to add -K to the end for prompting the sudo password
• If you don't use SSH keys for logging in you may need to add other parameters also. Try -c paramiko and -k. See all the available options with ansible-playbook -h.

Tips

Start/stop/restart Solr
Login to the server using ssh. Then...

$ sudo service solr start/stop/restart

Settings

Default settings are stored in roles/jiv_e.solr/default/main.yml and you can find plenty of documentation there also.

You can change the settings by editing a default settings file but it's better to override them. See below list for some places you can do that.

1. At the command line after ansible-playbook -e parameter
   • http://docs.ansible.com/playbooks_variables.html#passing-variables-on-the-command-line
2. In the hosts file
   • http://docs.ansible.com/intro_inventory.html#host-variables
3. In files host_vars/hostname or group_vars/groupname
   • You have to create these yourself and use host names or groups in your hosts file
   • See http://docs.ansible.com/playbooks_best_practices.html#directory-layout
   • See also the previous link to understand how to name hosts and form host groups