Elastic Search

ElasticSearch is a Lucene based search engine that powers FlightDeck search. We also use pyes (link) a pythonic interface to ElasticSearch.

Running ElasticSearch

FlightDeck was developed with ElasticSearch 14.4 so we recommend downloading that and running it. You will need to point it at a config file that we’ve included in scripts/es/es.yml:

elasticsearch -f -Des.config=$ROOT/scripts/es/es.yml

Where $ROOT is your FlightDeck home.

Configuration

This configuraion can be overridden if necessary. FlightDeck by default uses port 9201 and 9301. More details are here.

Development

settings.py needs to be overridden in order to use ElasticSearch. Both ES_DISABLED needs to be False and ES_HOSTS needs to be set. This can be done in settings_local.py.

Testing

In order for testing to work ES_HOSTS needs to be defined (otherwise SkipTest will be raised) and ElasticSearch needs to be running. We specifically look at a single index, test_flightdeck, in order to avoid conflicts with development data.

Todo

In the future we may need to:

• Add items and remove items asynchronously using Celery.
• Build a frontend for search.
• Add custom mapping.