Category: General

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…

Houston, you there ?? We’ve had a problem here.

One of our EC2 instance which has Redis server on it, got hacked out of nowhere.
Just before we knew it is hacked, we were screwing up with Redis configuration and thinking what could go wrong with it.

Houston – Roger that, give us more details.

Well, we’ve recently shifted our Redis server to new EC2 instance. The reason we had to do that was because, our Sidekiq processing got much bigger and we couldn’t afford it alongside the Nginx + Passenger. So we took a call to separate it out.

But while configuring Redis, we think we made some mistake :(.

Houston – What is that ?

Basically, we wanted the Redis to listen to all of our Passenger instances . Though by default, it listens on localhost because it’s  bind directive is set to  127.0.0.1 , it’s possible to listen on multiple interfaces by providing multiple IP…