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MeiliSearch: Zero-config alternative to Elasticsearch, made in Rust

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Re: MeiliSearch: Zero-config alternative to Elasticsearch, made in Rust

#81

Post by mst »

Kerollmops wrote: post #37
time0ut wrote: post #31

Nice. This looks promising. Very clean API. I like the focus on a narrow use case. Do you have any information on security topics like using TLS, client authentication, etc?

Currently we think this kind of security can be enabled by a simple nginx setup, allowing autorefesh of certificates easily (e.g. certbot). But in the future we will probably handle that in the engine itself.

I was thinking it might be nice to be able to have an HMACed token with an expiry as an option - so e.g. my main http-serving thing could provide one of those to allow the frontend to read for a bit but kick the user off after half an hour or whatever if the token isn't refreshed.

I've no issue with offloading SSL to a different process though, I tend to prefer doing that anyway a lot of the time.

Re: MeiliSearch: Zero-config alternative to Elasticsearch, made in Rust

#82

Post by mst »

Bedon292 wrote: post #11

While this might be an alternative for that one specific use case (search bar), it does not feel like a viable alternative to ES. I am sure it is great at that specific case, and don't want to knock them on that. But, I have never used ES for a simple search like they are. when I use ES, I want to store billions of records redundantly and search them by text, time, and/or location. And then create visualizations with…

I've seen ES used for meilisearch's precise use case quite a few times before now.

So it's not "an alternative to ES in general", it's "a thing designed to be an alternative for a subset of ES use cases", and the comparison document is pretty clear about this.

https://docs.meilisearch.com/resources/comparison_to_alterna...

Re: MeiliSearch: Zero-config alternative to Elasticsearch, made in Rust

#84

Post by fareesh »

heipei wrote: post #20

I know the project doesn't claim it, but the title somewhat implies this: I honestly don't understand people claiming ElasticSearch is hard to operate, especially not at small scales. If anything, ElasticSearch for me has been one of the easiest pieces of infrastructure to operate, for me pretty much "zero-config". Let me elaborate: You can run ElasticSearch via Docker command-line, if you want a cluster you just sup…

We built a "Yelp for Colleges" product several years ago. The product needed a unified search where students could search for either a course or a college or a question from the forums with typeahead / autocomplete to get them to where they wanted to go quickly, with support for misspellings.

In all there were about 50k documents, and we mostly cared about the title field. Elasticsearch would randomly bloat up to occupy a huge amount of RAM. Restarting it would make it work for a few days. It would also occasionally crash.

We got rid of it and went with some levenshtein distance based database query

I'd love to use it again sometime but the experience was not good, and Googling for information brought up all kinds of very complex use-cases shared by others

Re: MeiliSearch: Zero-config alternative to Elasticsearch, made in Rust

#85

Post by Kerollmops »

fareesh wrote: post #84
heipei wrote: post #20

I know the project doesn't claim it, but the title somewhat implies this: I honestly don't understand people claiming ElasticSearch is hard to operate, especially not at small scales. If anything, ElasticSearch for me has been one of the easiest pieces of infrastructure to operate, for me pretty much "zero-config". Let me elaborate: You can run ElasticSearch via Docker command-line, if you want a cluster you just sup…

We built a "Yelp for Colleges" product several years ago. The product needed a unified search where students could search for either a course or a college or a question from the forums with typeahead / autocomplete to get them to where they wanted to go quickly, with support for misspellings. In all there were about 50k documents, and we mostly cared about the title field. Elasticsearch would randomly bloat up to occ…

Go on and try MeiliSearch, 50k documents are easily handled by the engine and with not much RAM usage.

It will take you something like 10 minutes to start and populate MeiliSearch, you will be able to test it just by going to the server HTTP url in no time!

Re: MeiliSearch: Zero-config alternative to Elasticsearch, made in Rust

#86

Post by heipei »

dijit wrote: post #38
heipei wrote: post #20

I know the project doesn't claim it, but the title somewhat implies this: I honestly don't understand people claiming ElasticSearch is hard to operate, especially not at small scales. If anything, ElasticSearch for me has been one of the easiest pieces of infrastructure to operate, for me pretty much "zero-config". Let me elaborate: You can run ElasticSearch via Docker command-line, if you want a cluster you just sup…

Elasticsearch is easier than mongo in some ways and harder in others. I run a few 10TiB ES clusters (which, is not much to be fair) but infrequently find that I have to reindex or reshard the cluster because I can’t just add another node. There’s something to be said for understanding the index rotation too, and access patterns. It’s easy to make an ES cluster, it’s difficult to maintain one, it’s nearly impossible t…

Would be interested to hear why you can't add another node in some cases.

Re: MeiliSearch: Zero-config alternative to Elasticsearch, made in Rust

#87

Post by seemslegit »

qdequelen wrote: post #77
computerex wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It'd still be zero-config to provide it's primary function. I don't think anyone would say anything against MeiliSearch or not consider it zero-config had they decided to enable analytics off an env var rather than having analytics be sent by default.

I would like to clarify that by analytics we are only talking about 1 ping per day that sends a hash that allows us to uniquely identify a user. The privacy of the users is kept. It just serves us to know if our work is being used.

> I would like to clarify that by analytics we are only talking about 1 ping per day that sends a hash that allows us to uniquely identify a user.

This is already pretty invasive - it discloses activity, number of machines deployed, IP address which identifies location and often organizations and individuals (and which is considered protected personal data per the GDPR afaik).

> The privacy of the users is kept.

No it isn't, see above - even as the authors you don't get to decide what data does or doesn't infringe upon the users privacy.

> It just serves us to know if our work is being used.

This is irrelevant, if you want to condition the use of your work on being let known where and how it is being used then license it accordingly and abide by the applicable laws.

Re: MeiliSearch: Zero-config alternative to Elasticsearch, made in Rust

#88

Post by Kerollmops »

mst wrote: post #81
Kerollmops wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Currently we think this kind of security can be enabled by a simple nginx setup, allowing autorefesh of certificates easily (e.g. certbot). But in the future we will probably handle that in the engine itself.

I was thinking it might be nice to be able to have an HMACed token with an expiry as an option - so e.g. my main http-serving thing could provide one of those to allow the frontend to read for a bit but kick the user off after half an hour or whatever if the token isn't refreshed. I've no issue with offloading SSL to a different process though, I tend to prefer doing that anyway a lot of the time.

I understand what you mean but is it for a specific usage of a search engine? I was thinking that this kind of time-restricted tokens could also be managed by the nginx instance, our engine doesn't support that for the time being.

Re: MeiliSearch: Zero-config alternative to Elasticsearch, made in Rust

#89

Post by burntsushi »

comex wrote: post #61
burntsushi wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Data races and race conditions are orthogonal, according to some: https://blog.regehr.org/archives/490 I think you've disagreed with this in the past, and I don't know how to resolve that. But certainly, I think we can agree that saying that Rust's safety story prevents race conditions is, at minimum, very imprecise.

Oops, I wasn't trying to reopen an argument. I didn't recall us having discussed it before (still don't, but I forget things easily). And yeah, I'd agree with your last sentence.

Ah yeah, it could have been someone else... Not sure. It was a while ago. Anyway, I don't personally have a strong opinion here on definitions here. (I'm not qualified to.)

Re: MeiliSearch: Zero-config alternative to Elasticsearch, made in Rust

#90

Post by tmzt »

DarkCrusader2 wrote: post #72
tmzt wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are there any that fit the log searching use case, apart from loki which doesn't do full text searching?

I think vector[0] does what you are asking for. [0] https://github.com/timberio/vector

Thanks, but I'm looking for alternatives to the ElasticSearch in that diagram.

Vector looks like a good choice to fill the index, and should be easy enough to modify to support Meili.

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