Install Solr Inside Docker Container in Linux

Solr is a search platform that is based on a Java library called Lucene. Solr is an open-source project available under the Apache License 2.0.

This tutorial explains how to install Solr inside a Docker container in the Linux. Commands have been tested on Ubuntu.

Prepare environment

Make sure you have installed Docker in your system. If you are using Ubuntu, installation instructions can be found in the post.

Install Solr

Create directory for storing Solr data:

sudo mkdir -p /opt/solr/data

Set user, which ID is 8983 as owner for newly created directory:

sudo chown -R 8983:8983 /opt/solr

Note: it doesn't matter that user (ID: 8983) doesn't exist on host system. This user will be created in the container.

• Host network

Run the following command to create a container for Solr that uses host network:

docker run -d --name=solr --restart=always --network=host \
    -v /opt/solr/data:/var/solr \
    solr

• User-defined bridge network

User-defined bridge network can be used for listening on different port. By default, Solr service is listening on port 8983. It can be changed with -p option.

docker network create app-net

docker run -d --name=solr --restart=always --network=app-net \
    -p 8080:8983 \
    -v /opt/solr/data:/var/solr \
    solr

Testing Solr

Solr provides admin UI. Open a web browser and go to http://<IP_ADDRESS>:8983, where <IP_ADDRESS> is the IP address of the system.

Uninstall Solr

To completely remove Solr, remove its container:

docker rm --force solr

Remove Solr image:

docker rmi solr

You can also remove Solr data:

sudo rm -rf /opt/solr

If a user-defined bridge network was created, you can delete it as follows:

docker network rm app-net