Securing Apache Solr - part I

This is the first post in a series of articles on securing Apache Solr. In this post we will look at deploying an example SolrCloud instance and securing access to it via basic authentication.

1) Install and deploy a SolrCloud example

Download and extract Apache Solr (6.6.0 was used for the purpose of this tutorial). Now start SolrCloud via:

• bin/solr -e cloud

Accept all of the default options. This creates a cluster of two nodes, with a collection "gettingstarted" split into two shards and two replicas per-shard. A web interface is available after startup at: http://localhost:8983/solr/.

Once the cluster is up and running we can post some data to the collection we have created via the REST interface:

• curl http://localhost:8983/solr/gettingstarted/update -d '[ {"id" : "book1", "title_t" : "The Merchant of Venice", "author_s" : "William Shakespeare"}]'
• curl http://localhost:8983/solr/gettingstarted/update -d '[ {"id" : "book2", "title_t" : "Macbeth", "author_s" : "William Shakespeare"}]'
• curl http://localhost:8983/solr/gettingstarted/update -d '[ {"id" : "book3", "title_t" : "Death of a Salesman", "author_s" : "Arthur Miller"}]'

We can search the REST interface to for example return all entries by William Shakespeare as follows:

• curl http://localhost:8983/solr/gettingstarted/query?q=author_s:William+Shakespeare

2) Authenticating users to our SolrCloud instance

Now that our SolrCloud instance is up and running, let's look at how we can secure access to it, by using HTTP Basic Authentication to authenticate our REST requests. Download the following security configuration which enables Basic Authentication in Solr:
Two users are defined - "alice" and "bob" - both with password "SolrRocks". Now upload this configuration to the Apache Zookeeper instance that is running with Solr:

• server/scripts/cloud-scripts/zkcli.sh -zkhost localhost:9983 -cmd putfile /security.json security.json

Now try to run the search query above again using Curl. A 401 error will be returned. Once we specify the correct credentials then the request will work as expected, e.g.:

• curl -u alice:SolrRocks http://localhost:8983/solr/gettingstarted/query?q=author_s:Arthur+Miller