What's missing with SOLRPLugin installation?

I installed and enabled SOLRPlugin 1.10 via the Foswiki configure page. I installed the required Perl modules as well.

I am trying to use SOLR. There are problems.

Attempting

<foswiki-dir>/tools/solrstart

results in an error

ERROR can't find a solr home at /Users/vlb/foswiki/trunk/core/solr-run

Wel, yeah, I wouldn't expect it to be in my home dir. So I checked configure. The {SolrPlugin}{SolrHome} setting is empty. Info on that setting says this should be set to

Path to the directory containing the start.jar file. That's where the jetty engine is located and where solr puts its data further down the directory structure

A quick find on my foswiki tree didn't turn up a start.jar file anywhere.

Now I'm very confused. I thought, from the docs, that installing SOLRPlugin was supposed to also install everything that SLRPlugin required. Where does it put this stuff? How do I check what happened?

... hmmmm... perhaps I was mistaken in thinking that the installation of SOLRPLugin automatically installed SOLR as well?

I went back to Extensions.SOLRPlugin and downloaded SolrPlugin -bin.tar.gz directly and unpacked it into my foswiki tree (see Support.Question1127). Now I have a start.jar file. I went back to configure and set {SolrPlugin}{SolrHome} to /WWW/foswiki/solr which is the path to the directory containing the start.jar file.

but tools/solrstart results in the same error.

I don't see any documentation on where I am supposed to configure the variables used in solrstart, particularly FOSWIKI_ROOT.

tools/solrstart:

#!/bin/sh

# script to start the solr engine using jetty 

# configure section
test -z $FOSWIKI_ROOT && FOSWIKI_ROOT=~/foswiki/trunk/core

# directory where the solr home and the jetty engine is in
SOLRHOME=$1
test -z $SOLRHOME && SOLRHOME=$FOSWIKI_ROOT/solr-run

test -d $SOLRHOME || {
  echo "ERROR can't find a solr home at $SOLRHOME"
  exit 1
}

cd $SOLRHOME || {
  echo "ERROR can't change directory to $SOLRHOME"
  exit 2
}

nohup java -jar start.jar >/dev/null &

exit 0

-- VickiBrown - 09 Jul 2012

I can edit the solrstart file but if I'm supposed to do that, the docs need to say so.

-- VickiBrown - 10 Jul 2012

Don't use the solrstart mechanism. It is too error prone. Instead, run the solr server in a servlet container (tomcat or jetty) controlled by the init process of your server.

-- MichaelDaum - 10 Jul 2012

Michael - aside from the fact that this isn't the documented recommendation... I have no idea how I would do that. In addition, I have no idea how I would tel a client to do that. The whole point of including the Java runtime with the SOLRPlugin installation is to make it easy to run SOLR without having to install SOLR separately.

-- VickiBrown - 11 Jul 2012