One of the popular choices for advanced search on Drupal 8 websites is Elasticsearch. In this article, we will review the benefits and principle of Elasticsearch. And, as our company offers both dedicated development teams and Drupal support, we are also ready to show you in practice how awesome Elasticsearch in Drupal 8 can be. We can either build you a robust Elasticsearch feature or improve your existing one. So let’s begin the story.
What is Elasticsearch, and what are its benefits?
Elasticsearch is an open-source enterprise-level search engine. It is based on the powerful Apache Lucene library, written in Java. Elasticsearch uses a simple RESTful API to perform actions and stores entities as structured JSON documents.
Elasticsearch could be very useful for your Drupal 8 website because:
- It easily handles large amounts (even petabytes) of data.
- It operates even the most complex queries at a very high speed.
- It is meant for use in distributed system and is awesome at horizontal scaling.
- It offers plenty of search options:
- faceted search with multiple filters
- fuzzy search that handles misspellings
- full-text search
- customized stem search
- autocomplete and instant search to predict user’s queries
- spell check
- geolocation search
- and many more.
- It allows for fine-tined queries with precise results thanks to JSON-based DSL.
- It tracks all search queries in a log so you can analyse them.
- It lets you quickly restore any data you lose thanks to change records.
A glimpse at Elasticsearch in Drupal 8
Of course, when there is something great, Drupal community provides modules to implement it. So, in addition to the fresh version of Elasticsearch, websites will basically need two Drupal modules for the Elasticsearch integration:
- Search API, the general powerful module for search features that cooperates with engine-specific modules.
- Elasticsearch connector, the module to add Elasticsearch to Drupal 8. For this role, there is also the option to use the Elastic Search module. However, the Elasticsearch connector seems more ready for the job.
You can also use additional modules and tools like Apache Tika, Search API attachments, Search API Elasticsearch Attachments, and more.
Support in case of Elasticsearch issues on your Drupal site
As mentioned in the beginning, we are a development and support team in one, so we also accept applications for improvements.
Like any functionality, Elasticsearch in Drupal 8 may develop issues — mostly because development is a tedious process that needs to consider many tricky details. Some examples of Elasticsearch issues may include:
- The Elasticsearch feature not working for you
- You are unable to connect to Elasticsearch
- The searches do not return what you expect
- Errors like “Missing modules” are showing
- Queries with special characters are not found
- And others
If are experiencing any of these issues or others, keep calm and contact our Drupal support team. Each case can be solved by our experienced drupalers. Everything will be found!
Your successful search
So if you are looking for the team that can provide any help with Elasticsearch in Drupal 8, congrats on the successful search! We are here for you.
