Serving content with Solr's Jetty instance.

When prototyping with Solr 1.4.x, I've found it useful to serve webpages, javascript and images using the Jetty server used by Solr's example instance. Doing so is straightforward:

Create a directory named contexts in the Solr examples directory which contains the etc and start.jar files. Create a context definition file inside this directory. It can be named anything, I commonly call it root-context.xml

The file contains the following:

<Configure class="org.mortbay.jetty.webapp.WebAppContext">
  <Set name="contextPath">/</Set>
  <Set name="resourceBase"><SystemProperty name="jetty.home" default="."/>/contexts/root</Set>
  <Set name="defaultsDescriptor"><SystemProperty name="jetty.home" default="."/>/etc/webdefault.xml</Set>
</Configure>

In the contexts directory, create a directory named root and place your content there. Voila -- once you launch the solr instance with java -jar start.jar, everything placed in the root directory is available under http://yourhostname:8983, while solr is availble at http://yourhostname:8983/solr