Solr post Command Syntax and Examples | Lucene and Solr Reference

The Solr post Command

Beginner

Many people use a custom search application like Apache Solr to index documents in an enterprise search capacity. Here, generally, documents are stored privately and internal security topics are less of a focus because the end-users are typically trusted employees. The post tool, in this case however, can be set up for use only by specific users with a password.

In public-facing custom search applications, security becomes a much greater issue for website search tools. Here, many developers have relied on Google Custom Search or Google Site Search to simplify the process. Whether you are developing a custom search application using a managed search offering or with Apache Solr or Elasticsearch, in a production environment file directory locations will change from what is presented here. This illustration describes locations in a test environment.

Regardless of your application, adding documents to the Solr index is a very important and sometimes complicated step. Many firms prefer to develop a custom posting method provided by other means, including: Solrj Client APIs, custom Data Import Handlers, Solr Cell, Apache Tika and Apache Nutch.

Here we cover the basic operations of the bin/post script. It is also referred to as the solr post tool, solr post script, solr post command and sometimes just solr index.

Apache Solr Reference

1. About the solr post command

The bin/post command allows you to post one document, directories of documents and perform a basic web crawl.

The bin/post command is a Linux shell script that calls on a Java Archive file JAR called the SimplePostTool. It will work on Linux and macOS systems, but will not run on Windows without pointing to a different location (see below).

The bin/post command itself has 16 options.

2. Syntax for the solr post command

The syntax for running bin/post is as follows.

$ bin/post -c <name> [OPTIONS] <file|directories|urls|-d ["...",...]>

This syntax assumes your current working directory is the $SOLR_HOME directory for Solr, which for version 7 would be ~/solr-7.0.0/ in standalone mode for a local installation. When running in a production environment the directory locations may differ.

So the path to the location of the solr post script is: ~/solr-7.0.0/bin/post. Alternatively, the solr script can be run using the convention ./post from within the bin directory.

If Solr Windows is your preferred environment for custom search, the solr post script is run by pointing to the JAR file. One can be found at example\exampledocs\post.jar. To find help on this use java -jar example\exampledocs\post.jar -help from the installation directory. Please see the documentation for Windows as the rest of this page will refer to usage in Linux-type environments.

3. Options for the solr post command

The bin/post command can take 16 options (parameters). Required fields include the core or collection name with the -c option and the location of the files to post.

Option	Purpose	Default
`-c <name>`	The name of the core or collection.	None, but required.
`<files\|directories\|urls ["...",...]>`	The location of the files to be indexed.	None, but required.
`-d <["...",...]>`	Files to be deleted from the index.	None
`-url <update URL>`	To point to a different location for the core or collection.	None
`-host <host>`	To point to a different hostname.	localhost
`-p <port> or -post <port>`	To point to a different port number.	8983
`-commit yes\|no`	To commit the post.	yes
`-u <user:password> or -user <user:password>`	To post when user credentials are required.	None
`-recursive <depth>`	The number of directories below to find documents for web crawls.	1
`-delay <seconds>`	The delay in seconds between each http request for web crawls.	10
`-delay <seconds>`	To delay in seconds between each post when crawling directories.	0
`-type <content/type>`	The type of document to be indexed when documents posted as standard input.	application/xml
`-filetypes <[,<type>,...]`	The types of documents to be indexed.	xml, json, jsonl, csv, pdf, doc, docx, ppt, pptx, xls, xlsx, odt, odp, ods, ott, otp, ots, rtf, htm, html, txt, log
`-params "<key>=<value>[&<key>=<value>...]"`	To post documents to the update request using URL-encoding.	None
`-out yes\|no`	To report results of the post to the console.	no
`-format solr`	To send application/json content to /update instead of /update/json/docs.	None

4. Examples of the solr post command

Example 1 - Post a JSON document to the films core

The following command posts one JSON file in the example/films directory to the films core and exits.

$ bin/post -c films example/films/films.json

Example 2 - Post a CSV document to the films core with a status

The following command posts one CSV file in the example/films directory to the films core, prints a response to the console and exits.

$ bin/post -c films -out yes example/films/films.csv

Example 3 - Post an XML document to the films core

The following command posts one XML file in the example/films directory to the films core, on the non-default port of 8984 and exits.

$ bin/post -c films -p 8984 example/films/films.xml

Example 4 - Post a directory of documents to the techproducts collection

The following command posts a directory of files with mixed formats in the example/exampledocs directory to the techproducts collection and exits.

$ bin/post -c techproducts example/exampledocs

Example 5 - Post HTML documents recursively to the films core

The following command posts HTML files in a remote example.com/docs directory and two directories below with a pause of 20 seconds between each request, while obeying directory permissions in the website's robots.txt file.

$ bin/post -c films -filetypes html example.com/docs -recursive 2 -delay 15

Example 6 - Find additional help on the post script

Any of the following three options prints help information and usage for the post tool, similar to a man page: bin/post -h, or bin/post -help, or bin/post -usage.

$ bin/post -help

The Solr post Command Syntax and Examples