Introduction

While setting up a new instance of SugarCRM 7.1 I reached a point in which Elasticsearch is required to continue. This is a very welcomed surprise! For those of you not familiar with full text search in SugarCRM, it offers the following benefits.

• Full text search on keywords or partial words
• Quick View previews search results with the search string highlighted
• Prioritized results are shown first for the module from which the search is performed, followed by results from other modules
• Wildcard searches
• Include a field name in searches to filter results by matches to that field only
• Show All link displays the full search results from each module in separate panels

Installation

While Googling I noticed a common theme of making installation way more difficult than it needed to be. Many tutorials have you install Elasticsearch, install a service wrapper, move files and directories here and there, etc. Overkill.

Installing it is pretty simple using the provided RPM from the Elasticsearch website.

cd ~
sudo yum update
sudo yum install java-1.7.0-openjdk -y

wget https://download.elasticsearch.org/elasticsearch/elasticsearch/elasticsearch-0.90.10.noarch.rpm

rpm -Uvh elasticsearch-0.90.10.noarch.rpm 

chkconfig elasticsearch on

If you are installing for SugarCRM (which is a majority of the traffic generated to this post), I recommend adding the following to the configuration file located at /etc/elasticsearch/elasticsearch.yml

Testing

Testing to make sure it works is pretty straight forward. Using curl we will make sure the service is running on the standard port of 9200.

curl http://localhost:9200

The results returned should resemble something along the following lines.

{
  "ok" : true,
  "status" : 200,
  "name" : "Vagabond",
  "version" : {
    "number" : "0.90.8",
    "build_hash" : "909b037218cf880e8772b066a764f179f2d5e719",
    "build_timestamp" : "2013-12-18T16:08:16Z",
    "build_snapshot" : false,
    "lucene_version" : "4.6"
  },
  "tagline" : "You Know, for Search"
}

Full Text Search Examples

See the following links for more information on how to use Elasticsearch as a whole and some more specific SugarCRM examples.

http://joelabrahamsson.com/elasticsearch-101/

http://developer.sugarcrm.com/2012/07/06/full-text-search-tricks/