How to get started with Elasticsearch

There is a lot to Elasticsearch and the ecosystem that surrounds it. The search API is tough enough to learn on its own without trying to figure out how to get things set up, data loading, and your app talking to it.

I started putting together some resources to help you get started with Elasticsearch if you are just learning about it. I'll keep adding to this post as I create more content.

1. Learn what it's used for.

Here's a post/video I made on the subject: Elasticsearch is not just for search

IMHO, Elasticsearch has 4 major use cases:

• Full Text Search
• Aggregations
• Near Real Time Monitoring
• Monitoring / Alerting

2. Setup a local development environment

The easiest way to get Elasticsearch and its cousins up and running is with Docker. It's worth setting up if you can, it makes life so much easier.

I created a quick, very quick, guide and repository to setting up Elasticsearch. You can check out the video here.

3. Make a little web app

Once you have things running locally, you can make a little app with a search box that will display the results. Here is a basic query that will search all text fields in all indexes:

GET /_search
{
  "query": {
    "simple_query_string": {
      "query": "Your Search Here"
    }
  }
}

I'd like to get a video together on this, so stay tuned!

4. Make it better

Now that you've got a little web app set up, you can start having fun! Add search auto-complete, paging, charts, faceted navigation, make some dashboards in Kibana etc.

I'll have some more info on this soon too, so stay in touch!

Have any other suggestions? Let me know!

Tags

• elasticsearch
• docker