The setup
You are a Rails developer. You installed sunspot-solr in development and it worked great. So you deploy to production and decide to install a production tomcat with
sudo apt-get install solr-tomcat
Assuming, of course, that you are running an Ubuntu server.
And it seems to work and starts up fine, but indexing fails. You try a few things. Nothing works. You google for answers and you land on this page.
The solution
No worries, just do this (as root).
cp RAILSDIR/solr/conf/schema.xml /usr/share/solr/conf/
cp RAILSDIR/solr/conf/solrconfig.xml /usr/share/solr/conf/
install -d -o tomcat6 -g tomcat6 /var/lib/tomcat6/solr/data/index
Why do you need this?
Sunspot has a prepackaged instance of Solr. When you say:
sunspot:solr:start
you are running that prepackaged instance and it stores the index data somewhere off the rails directory.
When you run the ubuntu solr-tomcat, it needs to be configured similarly to the prepackaged instance, thus the copying of the files and needs to know where to store the indexed data, thus the directory creation.