Very interesting question, Tiana. But to be honest, no, it doesn’t come up that often, at least that I’ve noticed (and I’m pretty active on these and other CF troubleshooting forums and lists).
As for solutions, I suspect you’ll find the first option below works well. As far as I know, there’s no problem at all running it on the same machine as CF. And I’d not worry as much about “updates”. It’s not often that updates seem to relate to the Solr engine (though I’ve not studied that really closely.)
But you’re right: it really ought to be easier to enable Solr after the fact (whether for the Standard/Server or Multiserver form of deployment). I too am surprised that it’s not come up before. I’ve just done a fair bit of googling hoping to find someone having discussed it, to no avail.
It would be a cool thing for someone to research/blog about. It may be fairly simple, just as enabling CF’s built-in web server or RDS features can be enabled after the fact, if you know what XML files to tweak. But then the Solr feature in CF runs as a service, so that has to be installed (I suspect that installer will do that), and then there are CF Admin configuration settings that need to be tweaked. I don’t use Solr enough myself to be excited to pursue this myself.
But do consider asking Ray Camden and/or Ben Nadel, who both offer a means on their blogs to answer specific questions. I think they’d be interested in this one, in particular, since it would be a great contribution to the community to document if there’s any solution. Ray can be reached via http://www.raymondcamden.com/contact.cfm, and Ben at http://www.bennadel.com/ask-ben/ask-ben-nadel.htm.
If you find an answer some day, please do share it here. Hope that helps.
/charlie
