Issues

Linux

NoClassDefFoundError (Number 1)

Difference between ClassNotFoundException and NoClassDefFoundError (Note: One of the comments helped me solve this issue).

Had this issue when trying to get LocalSolr working. I was using a Tomcat context file in conf/Catalina/localhost/solr.xml to point to the /repository/solr/war/apache-solr-1.3.0.war file.

It seems that even when using a context file, Tomcat will copy and explode the contents of the war file to webapps. The error was caused because the jar file was in the war file in /repository/solr/war/ but not in webapps/solr (Tomcat had not synchronised the changes).

To solve the problem, I stopped Tomcat, deleted webapps/solr and re-started Tomcat.

NoClassDefFoundError (Number 2)

java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError
  at org.apache.jsp.admin.index_jsp._jspService(index_jsp.java:69)

is usually caused because you have not copied the solr configuration files into the Tomcat folder (step 4 above).

From how to run solr in windows & Tomcat5.

failed to create an XPathFactory

java.lang.ExceptionInInitializerError
        at org.apache.solr.servlet.SolrServlet.init(SolrServlet.java:64)
        ...
Caused by: java.lang.RuntimeException: XPathFactory#newInstance() failed to create an XPathFactory for the default object model: http://java.sun.com/jaxp/xpath/dom with the XPathFactoryConfigurationException: javax.xml.xpath.XPathFactoryConfigurationException: No XPathFctory implementation found for the object model: http://java.sun.com/jaxp/xpath/dom
        at javax.xml.xpath.XPathFactory.newInstance(Unknown Source)
        at org.apache.solr.core.Config.<clinit>(Config.java:49)
        ... 28 more

Failed to create an XPathFactory for the default object model

Finally found out that the problem was due to the Tomcat Java 1.4 compatibility libraries. I had recently upgraded to Java 1.5, but forgot to remove them:

ls -l /usr/share/tomcat-5.5/common/endorsed/
total 0
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 38 Dec 26 12:15 xercesImpl.jar -> /usr/share/xerces-2/lib/xercesImpl.jar
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 52 Dec 26 12:15 xml-apis.jar -> /usr/share/xml-commons-external-1.3/lib/xml-apis.jar

rm /usr/share/tomcat-5.5/common/endorsed/xercesImpl.jar
rm /usr/share/tomcat-5.5/common/endorsed/xml-apis.jar

Index not created

When SOLR is started it tries to create an index in /home/integration/solr/:

WARNING: Solr index directory '/home/integration/solr/data/index' doesn't exist. Creating new index...

But the index is not created. When we try to run a search from the SOLR admin interface we get this exception:

Dec 26, 2006 5:22:58 PM org.apache.solr.core.SolrException log
SEVERE: java.lang.RuntimeException: java.io.IOException: /home/integration/solr/data/index not a directory
        at org.apache.solr.core.SolrCore.getSearcher(SolrCore.java:363)
        ...
Caused by: java.io.IOException: /home/integration/solr/data/index not a directory
        at org.apache.lucene.store.FSDirectory.init(FSDirectory.java:225)

To solve the problem change the owner and group on the solr folder so that tomcat has permission to create folders:

chown -R tomcat:tomcat /home/integration/solr/

Note: This can also be a problem in Windows. To solve the problem, check which user Tomcat is running as… and make sure that user has create permissions on the data folder.

SEVERE: Error filterStart

From /var/lib/tomcat5.5/logs/catalina_2008-04-06.log:

06-Apr-2008 19:37:41 org.apache.catalina.core.StandardContext start
SEVERE: Error filterStart
06-Apr-2008 19:37:41 org.apache.catalina.core.StandardContext start
SEVERE: Context [/solr] startup failed due to previous errors

Check /var/lib/tomcat5.5/logs/localhost.2008-04-06.log for further details.

Solution

To solve the problem:

I had to copy all the example configuration files, from the extracted archive to the repository folder (see above)…
Tomcat Security Manager

You might also need to disable the Tomcat security manager:

Running Solr on Debian with Tomcat

Edit /etc/default/tomcat5.5 and make sure TOMCAT5_SECURITY is set to no:
```
TOMCAT5_SECURITY=no
```