Java 7 or greater (Required)

A JDK from Oracle is preferred since it is the best tested with Solr. On the download page under “Java SE Downloads”, select the latest “Java Platform (JDK)” and install it.
Make sure that the JVM you are trying to use is in your PATH. You can verify via:

$ java -version
java version "1.7.0_05"
Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment (build 1.7.0_05-b05)
Java HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server VM (build 23.1-b03, mixed mode)

Cygwin (Optional, Recommended for Windows users)

Many examples in Solr documentation make use of the UNIX (including Linux and Mac OS-X) environment. The $ you see in some examples is the UNIX (bash) shell prompt.

If you don’t have a UNIX shell installed on your Windows PC already, there’s an awesome program called Cygwin that you should install – you’ll thank us later! While a UNIX-like environment is not a prerequisite, it will help immensely with the ability to follow certain documentation examples, testing, and getting help from the user forum.

Curl (Optional, Recommended)

Curl is a great UNIX command line utility for sending HTTP requests. If you’re using Cygwin, it’s not installed by default, so you’ll want to re-run the Cygwin installer and select “curl” from the “Net” package.

Curl is *not* a prerequisite, and is not recommended for high volume updating or querying in a production environment. It is normally only used for testing, examples, or scripting update commands where performance is not important.

If you have curl installed correctly, you’ll be able to talk to Solr from the command line. As an example:

$ curl "http://localhost:8983/solr/demo/query?q=hello"

And if the server is running, you’ll get a response like the following:

{
  "responseHeader":{
    "status":0,
    "QTime":1,
    "params":{
      "q":"hello"}},
  "response":{"numFound":0,"start":0,"docs":[]
  }}

Getting Started

Congratulations, you’re now ready to Get Started!