I was using acts_as_searchable for one of my project, which uses Hyperestraier in background. Yesterday I decided to use acts_as_solr which uses solr(based on Lucene Java search library). I did all written in its Manual/Readme, but when I issued

rake solr:start

to start the solr server, it threw a heart breaking “Bad file descriptor” error, although acts_as_solr was working fine on one of my colleague’s linux machine.

I started digging around this and found that there is an issue in rake task that starts the solr server. Actually the problem was this rake task uses ‘fork’ which is not available on windows, also it only handles ‘ECONNREFUSED’ exception which is actually “Connection Refused” error raised by ruby on linux. But in windown it throws ‘EBADF’ which is “Bad file descriptor” error raised by ruby on windows.

So below is the hack for that:

  desc 'Starts Solr. on windows . Options accepted: RAILS_ENV=your_env, PORT=XX. Defaults to development if none.'
  task :start_win do
    begin
      n = Net::HTTP.new('localhost', SOLR_PORT)
      n.request_head('/').value

    rescue Net::HTTPServerException #responding
      puts "Port #{SOLR_PORT} in use" and return

    rescue Errno::EBADF #not responding
      Dir.chdir(SOLR_PATH) do
          exec "java -Dsolr.data.dir=solr/data/#{ENV['RAILS_ENV']} -Djetty.port=#{SOLR_PORT} -jar start.jar"
        sleep(5)
        puts "#{ENV['RAILS_ENV']} Solr started sucessfuly on #{SOLR_PORT}, pid: #{pid}."
      end
    end
  end

Just add this to vendor/plugins/acts_as_solr/lib/taks/solr.rake, and start solr server on windows by issuing

rake solr:start_win