FreeAgent hackfest: App-wide Search
At FreeAgent we had our first hackfest a short while ago and I got off and played with ElasticSearch to build an app-wide search.
Here’s my short review from the Hack week round up post on the FreeAgent Engineering blog:
As we are about to move to Elasticsearch for indexing our logs, my Hack Week idea was to experiment with building an app-wide search function. It is just a prototype but it enables users to search across Contacts, Projects and Expenses and can easily be extended. Elasticsearch is accessed from Rails using the Tire gem. Instead of using Tire’s
after_save
callback to keep the index up to date, Elasticsearch has the concept of rivers which pulls new data. Every update triggers an AMQP message using Bunny which is then picked up by Elasticsearch RabbitMQ river.It was an exciting idea and I really enjoyed the hack week and had the opportunity of experimenting with new pieces of infrastructure which we hope to use soon.