Elasticsearch is a distributed RESTful search engine built for the cloud. Features include:
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Distributed and Highly Available Search Engine.
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Each index is fully sharded with a configurable number of shards.
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Each shard can have one or more replicas.
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Read / Search operations performed on any of the replica shards.
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Multi-tenant.
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Support for more than one index.
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Index level configuration (number of shards, index storage, etc.).
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Various set of APIs
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HTTP RESTful API
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All APIs perform automatic node operation rerouting.
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Document oriented
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No need for upfront schema definition.
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Schema can be defined for customization of the indexing process.
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Reliable, Asynchronous Write Behind for long term persistency.
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Near real-time search.
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Built on top of Apache Lucene
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Each shard is a fully functional Lucene index
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All the power of Lucene easily exposed through simple configuration and plugins.
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Per operation consistency
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Single document-level operations are atomic, consistent, isolated, and durable.
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First of all, DON’T PANIC. It will take 5 minutes to get the gist of what Elasticsearch is all about.
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Download and unpack the Elasticsearch official distribution.
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Run
bin/elasticsearchon Linux or macOS. Runbin\elasticsearch.baton Windows. -
Run
curl -X GET http://localhost:9200/to verify Elasticsearch is running.
First, index some sample JSON documents. The first request automatically creates
the my-index-000001 index.
curl -X POST 'http://localhost:9200/my-index-000001/_doc?pretty' -H 'Content-Type: application/json' -d '
{
"@timestamp": "2099-11-15T13:12:00",
"message": "GET /search HTTP/1.1 200 1070000",
"user": {
"id": "kimchy"
}
}'
curl -X POST 'http://localhost:9200/my-index-000001/_doc?pretty' -H 'Content-Type: application/json' -d '
{
"@timestamp": "2099-11-15T14:12:12",
"message": "GET /search HTTP/1.1 200 1070000",
"user": {
"id": "elkbee"
}
}'
curl -X POST 'http://localhost:9200/my-index-000001/_doc?pretty' -H 'Content-Type: application/json' -d '
{
"@timestamp": "2099-11-15T01:46:38",
"message": "GET /search HTTP/1.1 200 1070000",
"user": {
"id": "elkbee"
}
}'
Next, use a search request to find any documents with a user.id of kimchy.
curl -X GET 'http://localhost:9200/my-index-000001/_search?q=user.id:kimchy&pretty=true'
Instead of a query string, you can use Elasticsearch’s Query DSL in the request body.
curl -X GET 'http://localhost:9200/my-index-000001/_search?pretty=true' -H 'Content-Type: application/json' -d '
{
"query" : {
"match" : { "user.id": "kimchy" }
}
}'
You can also retrieve all documents in my-index-000001.
curl -X GET 'http://localhost:9200/my-index-000001/_search?pretty=true' -H 'Content-Type: application/json' -d '
{
"query" : {
"match_all" : {}
}
}'
During indexing, Elasticsearch automatically mapped the @timestamp field as a
date. This lets you run a range search.
curl -X GET 'http://localhost:9200/my-index-000001/_search?pretty=true' -H 'Content-Type: application/json' -d '
{
"query" : {
"range" : {
"@timestamp": {
"from": "2099-11-15T13:00:00",
"to": "2099-11-15T14:00:00"
}
}
}
}'
Elasticsearch supports multiple indices. The previous examples used an index
called my-index-000001. You can create another index, my-index-000002, to
store additional data when my-index-000001 reaches a certain age or size. You
can also use separate indices to store different types of data.
You can configure each index differently. The following request
creates my-index-000002 with two primary shards rather than the default of
one. This may be helpful for larger indices.
curl -X PUT 'http://localhost:9200/my-index-000002?pretty' -H 'Content-Type: application/json' -d '
{
"settings" : {
"index.number_of_shards" : 2
}
}'
You can then add a document to my-index-000002.
curl -X POST 'http://localhost:9200/my-index-000002/_doc?pretty' -H 'Content-Type: application/json' -d '
{
"@timestamp": "2099-11-16T13:12:00",
"message": "GET /search HTTP/1.1 200 1070000",
"user": {
"id": "kimchy"
}
}'
You can search and perform other operations on multiple indices with a single
request. The following request searches my-index-000001 and my-index-000002.
curl -X GET 'http://localhost:9200/my-index-000001,my-index-000002/_search?pretty=true' -H 'Content-Type: application/json' -d '
{
"query" : {
"match_all" : {}
}
}'
You can omit the index from the request path to search all indices.
curl -X GET 'http://localhost:9200/_search?pretty=true' -H 'Content-Type: application/json' -d '
{
"query" : {
"match_all" : {}
}
}'
Let’s face it; things will fail…
Elasticsearch is a highly available and distributed search engine. Each index is broken down into shards, and each shard can have one or more replicas. By default, an index is created with 1 shard and 1 replica per shard (1/1). Many topologies can be used, including 1/10 (improve search performance) or 20/1 (improve indexing performance, with search executed in a MapReduce fashion across shards).
To play with the distributed nature of Elasticsearch, bring more nodes up and shut down nodes. The system will continue to serve requests (ensure you use the correct HTTP port) with the latest data indexed.
We have just covered a tiny portion of what Elasticsearch is all about. For more information, please refer to the elastic.co website. General questions can be asked on the Elastic Forum or on Slack. The Elasticsearch GitHub repository is reserved for bug reports and feature requests only.
Elasticsearch uses Gradle for its build system.
To build a distribution for your local OS and print its output location upon completion, run:
./gradlew localDistro
To build a distribution for another platform, run the related command:
./gradlew :distribution:archives:linux-tar:assemble ./gradlew :distribution:archives:darwin-tar:assemble ./gradlew :distribution:archives:windows-zip:assemble
To build distributions for all supported platforms, run:
./gradlew assemble
Finished distributions are output to distributions/archives.
See the TESTING for more information about running the Elasticsearch test suite.
To ensure a smooth upgrade process from earlier versions of Elasticsearch, please see our upgrade documentation for more details on the upgrade process.