Searchkick

Search made easy

Usage

Searchkick provides sensible search defaults out of the box. It handles:

• stemming - tomatoes matches tomato
• special characters - jalapenos matches jalapeños
• extra whitespace - dishwasher matches dish washer
• misspellings - zuchini matches zucchini

Make Searches Better Over Time

Use analytics on search conversions to improve results.

Also, give popular documents a little boost.

Zero Downtime Changes

Elasticsearch has a feature called aliases that allows you to change mappings with no downtime.

Book.tire.reindex

This creates a new index books_20130714181054 and points the books alias to the new index when complete - an atomic operation :)

First time: If books is an existing index, it will be replaced by an alias.

Searchkick uses find_in_batches to import documents. To filter documents or eagar load associations, use the tire_import scope.

class Book < ActiveRecord::Base
  scope :tire_import, where(active: true).includes(:author, :chapters)
end

There is also a rake task.

rake searchkick:reindex CLASS=Book

Thanks to Jaroslav Kalistsuk for the original implementation and Clinton Gormley for a good post on this.

Elasticsearch Gotchas

Mappings

When changing the mapping in a model, you must create a new index for the changes to take place. Elasticsearch does not support updates to the mapping. For zero downtime, use the reindex method above which creates a new index and swaps it in once built. To see the current mapping, use:

curl "http://localhost:9200/books/_mapping?pretty=1"

Inconsistent Scores

Due to the distributed nature of Elasticsearch, you can get incorrect results when the number of documents in the index is low. You can read more about it here. To fix this, set the search type to dfs_query_and_fetch. Alternatively, you can just use one shard with settings: {number_of_shards: 1}.

Installation

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem "searchkick"

And then execute:

bundle

Contributing

1. Fork it
2. Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature)
3. Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Add some feature')
4. Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature)
5. Create new Pull Request