I've a mongoid embedded one to many model on Rails 3.1, to full text search within. I neet something very light and simple to deploy on heroku too, without having to pay for add-ons, initially.
All heroku Full-Text Search add-on currently, seem to have just paying plans (which is no good to start with), see Flying Sphinx and Websolr.
I need advice on a good solution (a ruby gem deployable on heroku) to start with and than to scale to other cloud services eventually.
Maybe MongoDB's core functionalities are enough for your needs:
http://www.mongodb.org/display/DOCS/Full+Text+Search+in+Mongo
There are two more possibilities that come into my mind:
1) you can use this gem:
https://github.com/mauriciozaffari/mongoid_search
2) you can use elasticsearch (http://www.elasticsearch.org/) and use the following gem:
https://github.com/karmi/tire
However, you couldnt use this solution with heroku only, you would have to setup your own server, for which in the case you want to use heroku, EC2 would be recommendable
We were using the sunspot_mongo gem with solr on Mongoid 2.4.
But after upgrading to Mongoid 3, support for sunspot seems to not be there. So we're investigating a move to elasticsearch with the tire gem. There are some new offerings in the "search as a service space" for elasticsearch, but they don't seem quite production ready yet, so hoping that changes quickly.
Hope it helps!
Related
there is any way to integrate the new Elasticsearch gem for ruby to rails, the tire was great but retired since two month and replaced by the new gem, however, no integrating functions with rails yet.
all the tutorial use tire, but now, how we can using rails with Elasticsearch?
A full-featured Rails integration is being worked on. If you want the high-level integration, and you don't want to provide it yourself, you can stick with Tire.
There is another gem called "searchkick" that integrates elasticsearch with Rails:
https://github.com/ankane/searchkick
It has some really cool features and can index data through rake tasks.
I have a minmimal implementation that I'm currently running for prototyping / evaluation of ElasticSearch, which has not thrown up any spanner in the works for a very focused prototyping run for the past 2 days ...
There's little or no error response checking yet, since our workloads heavily use Resque and we rely on Resque to capture and identify where we need to fine tune error handling.
https://gist.github.com/TobiG77/8610788
I've added sunspot gem in my application and tried to send it to production in heroku, but I'm trying to reindex my database, however, I'm getting an error. I did some more digging and I think I have to add websolr as an add-on? This costs $20/month. Is this the only option?
THanks
Founder of Websolr + Bonsai here (Heroku addons for Solr and Elasticsearch).
Rich's answer is pretty solid, with the exception of the SQL LIKE operator, which I do not recommend. The performance does not scale, and you're either going to sink in a lot more time than you might expect in order to eke out baseline search functionality. End result: a lot of time spent, and unhappy users.
Postgres full text search is a reasonable alternative, though the term analysis and result ranking will be lacking compared to Solr/Elasticsearch as your search traffic starts to grow in production.
You might also consider our sister service, Bonsai, which does offer a free Starter plan. It uses Elasticsearch, which means you'd want to use the official Ruby bindings for Elasticsearch rather than Sunspot.
Lastly, if you already have a production app on Heroku, you are welcome to create more than one index in your account, and share those indexes with your staging/qa and other apps.
I've done some more research and found out that there are other options if you don't want to take the websolr path. These other answers are good for some insights, but doesn't give an alternative to what can be used.
For some that's still looking, I suggest taking a look at Elastic Search
Rails Cast has a good tutorial on this as well.
And to use it with heroku, look into Bonsai which gives users a free option.
Hopefully this answer will help those that are also seeking other options than using sunspot gem with solr
Solr on Heroku uses their own add-on, which starts at $20pm:
Although I don't know why it costs up front, and doesn't have a "trial" option like many of the other Heroku Add-ons, there are certain ways around it
Full Text Search
Full text search is what you're performing, and Solr is a tool to make the process much more efficient. Despite being quite DB-expensive, you can use full text searching with Heroku, depending on your DB:
MYSQL
To perform full-text searching on MYSQL, you can simply use the "LIKE" operator with %variable% as your search phrase, like this:
SELECT * FROM `table` WHERE `name` LIKE `%benjamin%`
This basically finds all the records where the name column contains "benjamin" somewhere inside it. This is quite slow
POSTGRESQL
PostgreSQL offers more power in its full text searching, but is nonetheless still quite slow & expensive. You can read more about it here, but with rails, you can use a bunch of gems which do the task for you
We recently used a gem called textacular here: http://firststop.herokuapp.com
Here is the code we used for it:
#Search
def self.search(search)
basic_search(name: search, description: search)
end
Further Reading
You can see how full text searching works here: Any reason not use PostgreSQL's built-in full text search on Heroku?
I would recommend if you're just getting the foundations established for your app. Afterwards, you can upgrade to a more dedicated solution in the form of Solr et al
Here are
If you want to use the Heroku platform it starts for free, but you have to pay for almost every add-on, extra workers, extra storage, search engine, background tasks, you name it.
For $20/month you could also get a decent VPS, but you would have to install and manage that server by yourself.
As for sunspot/solr on Heroku, I don't think you can do that for free.
I've been working on a new project lately where a fantastic search engine is crucial. It's a rails3 app hosted on heroku and I'm looking into possible solutions(a rubygem would be ideal) which offer a easy way to have powerful full-text search.
Right now, I'm using acts_as_tsearch which leverages PostgreSQL and performs a basic MATCH query. Though, it's not really pulling back good results(for example, if I search for "create a project" and "how do i create a project" exists as a query, it doesn't find it).
Can anyone share their experiences with full text search, anyone tried out Solr ?
IndexTank is your best bet. They were recently added as a Heroku add-on.
We recently tried to just run our own search for our Heroku app and it's just not worth it because you have to worry about stability and scaling of that search box. It's better to go with a provider, like IndexTank.
IndexTank also powers Reddit and Wordpress.com, so can bet it'll be reliable.
SOLR works very nicely -- it's a bit pricey to get starts ($20 a month), but it just works, and works well.
They recently added the ability to ask the user "Did you mean to search for [correct spelling]".
You can easily cross-model search (search for Users and Cars and Dealerships).
Heroku offers addons which you can easily add to your application. You should take a look at Solr and IndexTank.
There's a free solution in the Texticle gem. It uses PostgreSQL's (> 8.3) full text index support and creates a search method on your models. If you create indexes, the speed is very good (for a free solution).
Hope that helps!
I am about to launch a beta site, and heroku looks like a great option. The only think that is getting me down is that the only search option is $20/mth for the Websolr add-on.
I am sure that Websolr is great, but at this very early point in this project, I rather not light up that expense.
Are there any free search options to couple with heroku's Blossom (free) plan.
I feel like such a cheapskate!
This post seems to have good options:
Leveraging the full text search of postgrSQL:
http://tenderlovemaking.com/2009/10/17/full-text-search-on-heroku.html
Also explains the options of Ferret and Solr.
IndexTank has a heroku addon you can use for free.
It has some advantages over websolr, like realtimeness, fast (all in ram), and a very flexible scoring system that doesn't require to reindex (allows for very easy a/b testing).
My gem pg_search does full-text search against PostgreSQL, and works directly on Heroku.
Check it out and let me know if it works for you!
acts_as_tsearch works great. No configuration needed if you have postgresql > 8.3. Have to experiment with multiple tables though. Will use it on heroku till i can afford the WebSolr Add-on. I found it a better option compared to the texticle method as explained in the article link above (tendermaking).
acts_as_tsearch: http://github.com/pka/acts_as_tsearch
No, I was looking for that too a week ago, and didn't find anything...
And I don't think there is any work in progress on another add-ons like this as they already have one, so they won't put another that is free... :/
Anyway, heroku is amazing, so try to make it work with code or just spend $20 :)
acts_as_ferret won't work as Heroku cleans up the /tmp directory regularly. Even i am in need of a full-text solution. Thinking of trying out the acts_as_tsearch plugin.
Looks like IndexTank was purchased by LinkedIn and will be discontinuing support (although some portions might be open-sourced in the future). See this post for more info: https://indextank.com/documentation/faq2
If you're using Postgres for your Rails app then take a look at this free way to do full text search:
Part 1 and
Part 2
This uses the pg_search gem to allow you to use PostgreSQL's pg_search_scopes feature and have full text search without any other dependencies.
I would like to do full-text searching of data in my Ruby on Rails application. What options exist?
There are several options available and each have different strengths and weaknesses. If you would like to add full-text searching, it would be prudent to investigate each a little bit and try them out to see how well it works for you in your environment.
MySQL has built-in support for full-text searching. It has online support meaning that when new records are added to the database, they are automatically indexed and will be available in the search results. The documentation has more details.
acts_as_tsearch offers a wrapper for similar built-in functionality for recent versions of PostgreSQL
For other databases you will have to use other software.
Lucene is a popular search provider written in Java. You can use Lucene through its search server Solr with Rails using acts_as_solr.
If you don't want to use Java, there is a port of Lucene to Ruby called Ferret. Support for Rails is added using the acts_as_ferret plugin.
Xapian is another good option and is supported in Rails using the acts_as_xapian plugin.
Finally, my preferred choice is Sphinx using the Ultrasphinx plugin. It is extremely fast and has many options on how to index and search your databases, but is no longer being actively maintained.
Another plugin for Sphinx is Thinking Sphinx which has a lot of positive feedback. It is a little easier to get started using Thinking Sphinx than Ultrasphinx. I would suggest investigating both plugins to determine which fits better with your project.
I can recommend Sphinx. Ryan Bates has a great screencast on using the Thinking Sphinx plugin to create a full-text search solution.
You can use Ferret (which is Lucene written in Ruby). It integrates seamless with Rails using the acts_as_ferret mixin. Take a look at "How to Integrate Ferret With Rails". A alternative is Sphinx.
Two main options, depending on what you're after.
1) Full Text Indexing and MATCH() AGAINST().
If you're just looking to do a fast search against a few text columns in your table, you can simply use a full text index of those columns and use MATCH() AGAINST() in your queries.
Create the full text index in a migration file:
add_index :table, :column, type: :fulltext
Query using that index:
where( "MATCH( column ) AGAINST( ? )", term )
2) ElasticSearch and Searchkick
If you're looking for a full blown search indexing solution that allows you to search for any column in any of your records while still being lightning quick, take a look at ElasticSearch and Searchkick.
ElasticSearch is the indexing and search engine.
Searchkick is the integration library with Rails that makes it very easy to index your records and search them.
Searchkick's README does a fantastic job at explaining how to get up and running and to fine tune your setup, but here is a little snippet:
Install and start ElasticSearch.
brew install elasticsearch
brew services start elasticsearch
Add searchkick gem to your bundle:
bundle add searchkick --strict
The --strict option just tells Bundler to use an exact version in your Gemfile, which I highly recommend.
Add searchkick to a model you want to index:
class MyModel < ApplicationRecord
searchkick
end
Index your records.
MyModel.reindex
Search your index.
matching_records = MyModel.search( "term" )
I've been compiling a list of the various Ruby on Rails search options in this other question. I'm not sure how, or if to combine our questions.
It depends on what database you are using. I would recommend using Solr as it offers up a lot of nice options. The downside is you have to run a separate process for it. I have used Ferret as well, but found it to be less stable in terms of multi-threaded access to the index. I haven't tried Sphinx because it only works with MySQL and Postgres.
Just a note for future reference: Ultra Sphinx is no longer being maintained. Thinking sphinx is its replacement. Although it lacks several features at this time like excerpting which Ultra sphinx had, it makes up for it in other features.
I would recommend acts_as_ferret as I am using it for Scrumpad project at work. The indexing can be done as a separate process which ensures that while re-indexing we can still use our application. This can reduce the downtime of website. Also the searching is much faster. You can search through multiple model at a time and have your results sorted out by the fields you prefer.