Integrating ElasticSearch Into A Rails App

There are plenty of indexing/search servers available out there like Solr, Sphinx, Elasticsearch, Google Search Appliance and many more.

But out of all the above, Elasticsearch is gaining more attention to it because of it’s popularity. This post is going to tell you only about it and it’s integration in Rails.

So, how would someone describe what an Elasticsearch is ?

From God’s perspective, it’s an open source, distributed, RESTful, search engine i.e. it has a very advanced distributed model, speaks JSON natively, and exposes many advanced search features, all seamlessly expressed through JSON DSL and REST API’s.

♦ Inception

Standard way of using ES in any application is to use it as a secondary data store i.e. data will be stored in some kind of SQL/NoSQL database and then continuously upserting required documents from it into ES, pretty neat.

Some of us might think why not use database itself…