Here is the core of the SOLRJ client that ended up accomplishing what I wanted
String fileName2 = "C:\\work\\SolrClient\\data\\worldwartwo.txt"; SolrServer server = new StreamingUpdateSolrServer("http://localhost:8080/solr/",20,8); UpdateRequest req = new UpdateRequest("/update/extract"); ModifiableSolrParams params = null ; params = new ModifiableSolrParams(); params.add("stream.file", new String[]{fileName2}); params.set("literal.id", fileName2); params.set("captureAttr", "false"); req.setParams(params); server.request(req); server.commit(); To get this to work correctly, the following server side config was needed (I started from a barebones solr config) 1. Add apache-solr-cell-3.5.0.jar to the <solrhost>/lib directory (or wherever solr can access jars) as this contains the class ExtractingRequestHandler 2. Add the appropriate handler for /update/extract in the solrconfig.xml (this uses the ExtractingRequestHandler class). I'll blog about this later on for the benefit of the community at large I'm still puzzled that there are no readily available alternatives to using the Tika based ExtractingRequestHandler in the situation where the input data is plain UTF-8 text files that SOLR needs to injest and index. I may need to look into defining a custom Request Handler if that's the right way to go. Thanks again -- View this message in context: http://lucene.472066.n3.nabble.com/Is-there-a-way-for-SOLR-SOLRJ-to-index-files-directly-bypassing-HTTP-streaming-tp3833419p3843593.html Sent from the Solr - User mailing list archive at Nabble.com.