ddev-enterprise-search

• Introduction
• Getting started
• How to debug in Github Actions

Introduction

ddev-enterprise-search is an un-official implementation of Elastic Enterprise Search service for DDEV based on their Docker guide*.

Enterprise Search is an additional Elastic service that adds APIs and UIs to those already provided by Elasticsearch and Kibana.

Currently sitting at version 8.12.0, part of the implementation as a service for DDEV includes a Kibana container. This means that to use this service, existing Kibana service needs to be uninstalled in your project and you should install the supported Elastic Search from DDEV.

From your DDEV project, install this by running ddev get ssmarco/ddev-enterprise-search followed by ddev restart. This can take up to 30 minutes or so due to downloading the required Docker containers (Elastic Search, Kibana and Enterprise Search).

• Reference
• Docker guide*

Getting started

1. In the DDEV project directory:

   For DDEV v1.23.5 or above run

    ddev add-on get ddev/ddev-elasticsearch
    ddev add-on get ssmarco/ddev-enterprise-search
   

   For earlier versions of DDEV run

    ddev get ddev/ddev-elasticsearch
    ddev get ssmarco/ddev-enterprise-search
   

2. Restart the DDEV instance:

    ddev restart
   

3. Get the URL of the Kibana dashboard (e.g. https://your-project-name.ddev.site:5602):

    ddev describe
   

4. Login with the username elastic and password elastic.

5. The API credentials can be obtained by following the URL https://YOUR-PROJECT-NAME.ddev.site:5602/app/enterprise_search/app_search/credentials (use your actual project name).

Configuring your framework

Silverstripe

1. Update your project’s .env file. The API keys are found in the Enterprise Search section of Kibana dashboard.

    ENTERPRISE_SEARCH_ENGINE_PREFIX="my-index"
    ENTERPRISE_SEARCH_API_KEY="private-xxxxxxxxxxxx-change-this"
    ENTERPRISE_SEARCH_API_SEARCH_KEY="search-xxxxxxxxxxxx-change-this"
    ENTERPRISE_SEARCH_ENDPOINT="http://enterprisesearch:3002"
   

2. The Enterprise Search endpoint is http://enterprisesearch:3002

3. The following modules are tested to work out of the box in your composer.json file:

    "silverstripe/silverstripe-search-service": "^3.0",
    "silverstripe/silverstripe-search-service-elastic": "^1.0@beta",
   

Recommendations

This is for local development purposes only. Testing large amount of data depends on the host computer’s resources. If you have a good amount of CPU’s and memory, you can increase the value of mem_limit for each container or remove this attribute to assign more resources as needed.

We have found that 4 to 6GB allocated to the docker provider seems to provide the best experience.

The default mem_limit (2GB) is usually enough for smaller indexes, under or around 1,000 documents. However, you may might encounter memory exhausted errors after a few hours or running elastic search. This will happen when the elastic dashboard starts returning 502 errors. You can check the logs or the ddev describe to confirm.

If this happens you can either restart (ddev restart), or increase the mem_limit to a higher allocation.

For more than 5k documents we recommend allocating your docker provider with 4 to 6 GB of memory, and increasing the default mem_limit from 2GB to 4GB.

How to configure your docker provider:

Docker desktop

1. Open Docker Desktop app
2. Click Preferences
3. Click ‘Advanced’ tab, you should then be able to configure the memory / cpu limit

Colima You can change the memory and cpu by stopping and starting colima with preferred options

colima stop
colima start --cpu 4 --memory 6

Increasing the mem_limit

In the .ddev/docker-compose.enterprise-search.yaml you can increase the mem_limit.

services:
    web:
        # elastic / config / kibana
        enterprisesearch:
            mem_limit: 6g

This will require you to restart your ddev box ddev restart.

Troubleshooting

1. Make sure all required containers are downloaded

    docker pull docker.elastic.co/elasticsearch/elasticsearch:8.12.0
    docker pull docker.elastic.co/kibana/kibana:8.12.0
    docker pull docker.elastic.co/enterprise-search/enterprise-search:8.12.0
   

2. Remove container volumes to restart from scratch

   List all existing volumes from your system:

    docker volume ls
   

   This will show example output below:

    DRIVER    VOLUME NAME
    local     ddev-your-project-name_elastic-certs
    local     ddev-your-project-name_elastic-data
    local     ddev-your-project-name_elastic-kibana
    local     ddev-your-project-name_enterprise-data
   

   Delete the volumes by running:

    docker volume rm ddev-your-project-name_elastic-certs \
    ddev-your-project-name_elastic-data \
    ddev-your-project-name_elastic-kibana \
    ddev-your-project-name_enterprise-data
   

3. Restart by ddev restart

4. Check the status of the project by ddev status

5. Check the logs

   The elastic-config container does the necessary prerequisites to glue together the other containers. It checks connection to Elastic Search and resets kybana_system password.

    ddev logs -s elastic-config
    ddev logs -s elasticsearch
    ddev logs -s kibana
    ddev logs -s enterprisesearch
   

6. Check job health

   You might need to install jq for better legibility of the output.

    docker inspect --format "" ddev-your-project-name-enterprisesearch | jq
    docker inspect --format "" ddev-your-project-name-kibana | jq
    docker inspect --format "" ddev-your-project-name-elasticsearch | jq
   

7. Check memory consumptions

    docker stats
   

Contribute

• Anyone is welcome to submit a PR to this repo. See README.md at https://github.com/ddev/ddev-addon-template, the parent of this repo.

Maintainer

• Contributed and maintained by Marco Hermo.