Elasticsearch is a full text search server powered by Lucene, the Apache Foundation text-search engine used also by Solr.

Elasticsearch is basically a a distributed real-time document store where every field is indexed and searchable, was built to be distributed from the ground up, can be used for real-time analytics, has multi-tenacy, REST API and uses JSON for its query DSL, features that make it quite attractive to developers.

Rails example application

Let’s install the Elasticsearch server on our machine: the project download page has both code and instructions organized in an attractive way, you won’t have any problem with it. If you’re on OSX you can install via homebrew using the following command: brew install elasticsearch

By default the server will run on port 9200, so after starting the service make sure everything is fine running curl -X GET http://localhost:9200/ in the terminal.

If everything works as expected we can now create the app and add the gems:

rails new demoapp cd demoapp echo