• Extensions

  • Blomstra Search, an elasticsearch fulltext search extension

Search provides an elasticsearch powered fulltext, drop-in search solution for Flarum. It is deemed of value for growing communities that need better search results than what vanilla can offer.

Why is this not part of core?
For small communities the usual MySQL fulltext search suffices. Once you install this extension things soon blow up, how?

  • A queue is recommended, for instance the database queue driver. You'll need this to delegate the seeding of post content to elastic. If you don't do this, the end user experience can be severely impacted with increased latency.
  • You will need to run elastic search, which in a meager form already requires at least more than one full vCPU and a few GB of memory.

So when do you need this? When you notice that your users have a hard time finding matches to key searches. If, to you, it is obvious a result should have been there, but vanilla Flarum throws other random things into the search results.

Installation

You will need php 8+ to install this extension.

composer require blomstra/search:"*"

Go to your admin area, enable the extension and fill in the required elasticsearch information.

Next, go to your commandline and do a first index of existing posts using the command:

php flarum blomstra:search:index  --recreate

This will create the field mapping required in elastic and will push indexing of discussions/posts to the queue. If you have no queue driver installed (I recommend you do), the indexing starts in the same process.

Command options

The blomstra:search:index can do more things:

  • --throttle=n allows throttling of indexing, where n is the number of seconds.
  • --only=posts allows indexing only posts or discussions
  • --continue allows you to continue where you left off if you stop the process

FAQ

Can I commission a feature for this extensions?
We would gladly take care of any commissions for this extension, or review any pull request made by any other developer to the target repository.
Reach out to us via https://helpdesk.blomstra.net. We will get back to you as soon as we can.

    luceos
    I don't understand exactly how we should use it.
    I installed Redis on the server. I installed the plugin, then installed the GB Redis Setup plugin to queue it.

    But I don't know how to adjust the settings.
    I don't know how to adjust Elastic Search settings either.

    Could you help?

        Alshain I don't know how to adjust Elastic Search settings either.

        Install the elastic extension, enable it in the admin area and check the settings of that extension. What exactly are you missing?

            luceos
            elastic endpoint is 127.0.0.1
            username elastic
            password: ?
            index : ?

            What will we write in these sections?

                Alshain my bad:

                endpoint is http://localhost:9200
                username/password are either the admin user or another one created for this index
                index can be set to flarum or something relating to the community you run, it is like a database to MySQL

                    luceos

                    Elasticsearch works when I experiment with curl on putty.

                    However, when I make the following settings, the search section returns empty.
                    I don't fully understand the problem 🙁


                    https://sorhadi.net

                    Can you check it when it's available?

                        Alshain you need to index existing posts first: php flarum blomstra:search:index --recreate

                        Sorry I missed the second screenshot

                            Alshain yeah I missed the second screenshot. Are you sure the queue worker is running? The GB redis extension has very limited information in terms of set up, honestly it lacks in that area. Once you set up that extension try php flarum and see if you can create a daemon for the queue worker.

                            Alternatively use the database queue for now (https://discuss.flarum.org/d/28151) or the package the GB redis extension is based on, it requires you to make some changes to your extend.php as it has no UX (https://discuss.flarum.org/d/21873-redis-sessions-cache-queues).

                                luceos Actually I wanted to install blomstra/flarum-redis first but got an error.

                                Then I installed the GB Redis plugin, but its settings are like this.

                                Is there anything else I should check?

                                  Alshain yes that's great! If the task is processed properly it will say "Processed" in green. Otherwise it will be in red (I think).

                                      Alshain make sure to create a daemon though so that the process keeps running with you needing to have that window open.