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

Elasticsearch was built to be distributed. However, with a low number of documents, the default settings can give us incorrect results. 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