Once Java is correctly installed, it's time to install Solr and make some initial tests. To simplify things, we will adopt the default distribution that you can download from the official page: http://lucene.apche.org/solr/ (the current version at the time of writing is Version 4.5). The zipped package can be extracted and copied to a folder of choice.

Once extracted, the Solr standard distribution will contain the folders shown in the following screenshot:

We will start Solr from here; even if we don't need to use all the libraries and examples obtained with the distribution, you can continue exploring the folders with your own examples after reading this book. Some of the folders are as follows:

For the moment, we will ignore the folders external to /. These folders will be useful later when we will need to use third-party libraries.

The simplest way to run the Solr instance will be by using the solr.jar launcher, which we can find in the /example folder. For our convenience, it's useful to define a new environment variable SOLR_DIST that will point to the absolute path: /the-path-of-solr-distribution/example. In order to use the example, in the most simplest way, I suggest you to put the unzipped Solr distribution at the location /SolrStarterBook/solr, where SolrStarterBook is the folder where you have the complete code examples for this book. We can easily create this new environment variable in the same way we created the CLASSPATH one.