Introduction to Elasticsearch in PHP

In this tutorial, we’re going to take a look at Elasticsearch and how we can use it in PHP. Elasticsearch is an open-source search server based on Apache Lucene. We can use it to perform super fast full-text and other complex searches. It also includes a REST API which allows us to easily issue requests for creating, deleting, updating and retrieving of data.

Installing Elasticsearch

To install Elasticsearch we first need to install Java. By default, it is not available in the repositories that Ubuntu uses so we need to add one.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:webupd8team/java

Next, we execute the following to update the sources.

sudo apt-get update

Once that’s done, we can install Java.

sudo apt-get install oracle-java8-installer

Next, let’s download Elasticsearch using wget.

wget https://download.elasticsearch.org/elasticsearch/elasticsearch/elasticsearch-1.5.2.tar.gz

Currently, the most recent stable version is 1.5.2 so that is what we used above. If you want to make sure you get the most recent version, take a look at the Elasticsearch downloads page.

Then, we extract and install.

mkdir es
tar -xf elasticsearch-1.5.2.tar.gz -C es
cd es
./bin/elasticsearch

When we access http://localhost:9200 in the browser, we get something similar to the following:

{
  "status" : 200,
  "name" : "Rumiko Fujikawa",
  "cluster_name" : "elasticsearch",
  "version" : {
    "number" : "1.5.2",
    "build_hash" : "62ff9868b4c8a0c45860bebb259e21980778ab1c",
    "build_timestamp" : "2015-04-27T09:21:06Z",
    "build_snapshot" : false,
    "lucene_version" : "4.10.4"
  },
  "tagline" : "You Know, for Search"
}

Continue reading %Introduction to Elasticsearch in PHP%

by Wern Ancheta via SitePoint