1. Getting started with Solr6: Download & Installation

Apache Solr Tutorial

Apache Solr is a replication and load-balancing querying software which builds on another open source technology Lucene managed by Apache Software Foundation (www.apache.org). Apache Solr is a fast, fault tolerant, scalable and highly reliable software product which provides automated failover and recovery centralized configuration and comes with an inbuilt Jetty server.

The Lucene search engine is an open source Java based full-text search library which provides an easy add document search capability to an application or website.

Apache Solr comes with a wide set of high impact features such as

Advanced Full-Text Search capabilities.
Optimized for High Volume traffic
Standard based open interfaces - XML, JSON & HTTP.
Comprehensive Administration Interfaces
Easy Monitoring.
Highly Scalable and Fault Tolerant.
Flexible and Adaptable with easy configuration.
Near Real - Time Indexing.
Extensible Plug-in Architecture.

listed on http://lucene.apache.org/solr/

Apache Solr has now become a software used worldwide by most of the major companies to index and search data using their website or application.

Following companies are using Apache Solr in their website and applications for various purpose as listed below:

NASA is using Solr as the Enterprise Search component in its NEBULA cloud computing platform.
AOL is using Solr to power its channels.
Cisco uses Solr at the core for social network search platform.
Chegg uses Solr for their site search feature for services.
Netflix uses Solr for their site search feature.
Reddit uses Solr for search.
Apple is using Solr.
FCC.gov website featuring Solr powered search and faceted navigation.
jobseeker.com.au has its search engine powered by Solr 3.5.
Instagram a Facebook company, uses Solr to power its geo-search API.
Panasonic Europe uses Solr to power the search and faceted navigation on it’s sites for 30 countries.
Whitehouse uses Solr via Drupal for site search w/highlighting & faceting.
Salesforce is using Solr.
EMC is using Solr.
Cnet use Solr for product search and faceted browsing.

As listed by Lucidworks on January 21, 2012.

This tutorial is designed for Linux users worldwide, covering the following topics.

Downloading Solr 6.3.0
Installing Solr 6.3.0
A Quick Overview of Solr 6.3.0
Integrating Solr with an application

1.Downloading Solr 6.3.0

Prerequisites:

Java 7 or greater:- You can download JDK (Java Development Kit) from the Oracle’s official website on the download page under “Java SE Downloads”.
CentOS, Cygwin (Optional):- Most of the examples in Solr official documentation make use of the UNIX environment. UNIX-like environment is not a prerequisite for Solr but it is helpful with the ability to follow certain documentation examples, testing, and getting help from the user forum.
Curl (Optional):- Curl is a Unix command line utility for sending HTTP requests, testing examples when performance is not important.

Download the latest Solr release from the Apache download mirror https://archive.apache.org/dist/lucene/solr/6.6.5/

2.Installing Solr 6.3.0

This section describes the procedure to install Solr 6.3.0 in your system.

Unpack Solr 6.3.0.zip

3.A Quick Overview of Solr 6.3.0

Once finished with download and installation of Solr 6.3.0, you can walk through Solr 6.3.0 directory.

bin folder:- The bin folder in Solr directory contains the scripts to Start and Stop the Solr Server at your system.
server & logs folder:- The server folder in Solr directory contains the logs folder where all the logs are written after starting Solr. The logs can be helpful to check for any error during implementation of Solr.
example folder:- The example folder consists of few example files which can be used to illustrate how Solr indexes the data present in the documents.
solr & server folder:- The solr folder under server directory contains different collections or cores created to be deployed by the application. The configuration and data for each of the core/ collection are stored in the respective core/ collection folder.
exampledocs folder:- The exampledocs folder under example directory provides set of files to be posted to Solr core or collection.

4. Integrating Solr with an Application

Schema:- The schema tells Solr about the contents of documents it will be indexing. Solr contains default schema such as basic configs, data driven schema configs, sample tech products configs.
Deploying Solr to your website or application.
Posting documents for which your users will search on Solr.
Configuring search capability in your website or application.