Asari is a Ruby wrapper for AWS CloudSearch, with optional ActiveRecord support for easy integration with your Rails apps.
"Asari" is Japanese for "rummaging search." Seemed appropriate.
Amazon Cloud Search will give you a Search Endpoint and Document Endpoint. When specifying your search domain in Asari omit the search- for your search domain. For example if your search endpoint is "search-beavis-er432w3er.us-east-1.cloudsearch.amazonaws.com" the search domain you use in Asari would be "beavis-er432w3er". Your region is the second item. In this example it would be "us-east-1".
asari = Asari.new("my-search-domain-asdfkljwe4") # CloudSearch search domain
asari.add_item("1", { :name => "Tommy Morgan", :email => "[email protected]"})
asari.search("tommy") #=> ["1"] - a list of document IDs
asari.search("tommy", :rank => "name") # Sort the search
asari.search("tommy", :rank => ["name", :desc]) # Sort the search descending
asari.search("tommy", :rank => "-name") # Another way to sort the search descending
asari.search(filter: { and: { title: "donut", type: "cruller" }})
asari.search("boston creme", filter: { and: { title: "donut", or: { type: "cruller",
type: "twist" }}}) # Full text search and nested boolean logic
For more information on how to use Cloudsearch boolean queries, see the documentation.
Because there is no "local" version of CloudSearch, and search instances can be kind of expensive, you shouldn't have to have a development version of your index set up in order to use Asari. Because of that, Asari has a "sandbox" mode where it does nothing with add/update/delete requests and just returns an empty collection for any searches. This sandbox mode is enabled by default - any time you want to actually connect to the search index, just do the following:
Asari.mode = :production
You can turn the sandbox back on, if you like, by setting the mode to :sandbox
again.
Asari defaults to a page size of 10 (because that's CloudSearch's default), but it allows you to specify pagination parameters with any search:
asari.search("tommy", :page_size => 30, :page => 10)
The results you get back from Asari#search aren't actually Array objects, either: they're Asari::Collection objects, which are (currently) API-compatible with will_paginate:
results = asari.search("tommy", :page_size => 30, :page => 10)
results.total_entries #=> 5000
results.total_pages #=> 167
results.current_page #=> 10
results.offset #=> 300
results.page_size #=> 30
By default Asari only returns the document id's for any hits returned from a search. If you have result_enabled a index field you can have asari resturn that field in the result set without having to hit a database to get the results. Simply pass the :return_fields option with an array of fields
results = asari.search "Beavis", :return_fields => ["name", "address"]
The result will look like this
{"23" => {"name" => "Beavis", "address" => "One CNN Center, Atlanta"},
"54" => {"name" => "Beavis C", "address" => "Cornholio Way, USA"}}
By default the ActiveRecord module for Asari is not included in your project. To use it you will need to require it via
require 'asari/active_record'
You can take advantage of that module like so:
class User < ActiveRecord::Base
include Asari::ActiveRecord
#... other stuff...
asari_index("search-domain-for-users", [:name, :email, :twitter_handle, :favorite_sweater])
end
This will automatically set up before_destroy, after_create, and after_update hooks for your AR model to keep the data in sync with your CloudSearch index - the second argument to asari_index is the list of fields to maintain in the index, and can represent any function on your AR object. You can then interact with your AR objects as follows:
# Klass.asari_find returns a list of model objects in an
# Asari::Collection...
User.asari_find("tommy") #=> [<User:...>, <User:...>, <User:...>]
User.asari_find("tommy", :rank => "name")
# or with a specific instance, if you need to manually do some index
# management...
@user.asari_add_to_index
@user.asari_update_in_index
@user.asari_remove_from_index
You can also specify a :when option, like so:
asari_index("search-domain-for-users", [:name, :email, :twitter_handle,
:favorite_sweater], :when => :indexable)
or
asari_index("search-domain-for-users", [:name, :email, :twitter_handle,
:favorite_sweater], :when => Proc.new { |user| !user.admin && user.indexable })
This provides a way to mark records that shouldn't be in the index. The :when option can be either a symbol - indicating a method on the object - or a Proc that accepts the object as its first parameter. If the method/Proc returns true when the object is created, the object is indexed - otherwise it is left out of the index. If the method/Proc returns true when the object is updated, the object is indexed - otherwise it is deleted from the index (if it has already been added). This lets you be sure that you never have inappropriate data in your search index.
Because index updates are done as part of the AR lifecycle by default, you also might want to have control over how Asari handles index update errors - it's kind of problematic, if, say, users can't sign up on your site because CloudSearch isn't available at the moment. By default Asari just raises these exceptions when they occur, but you can define a special handler if you want using the asari_on_error method:
class User < ActiveRecord::Base
include Asari::ActiveRecord
asari_index(... )
def self.asari_on_error(exception)
Airbrake.notify(...)
true
end
end
In the above example we decide that, instead of raising exceptions every time, we're going to log exception data to Airbrake so that we can review it later and then return true so that the AR lifecycle continues normally.
By default, Asari assumes that you're operating in us-east-1, which is probably
not a helpful assumption for some of you. To fix this, either set the
aws_region property on your raw Asari object:
a = Asari.new("my-search-domain")
a.aws_region = "us-west-1"
...Or provide the :aws_region option when you call asari_index on an
ActiveRecord model:
class User < ActiveRecord::Base
include Asari::ActiveRecord
asari_index("my-search-domain",[field1,field2], :aws_region => "us-west-1")
...
end
It's a gem named asari. Install it and make it available however you prefer.
Asari is developed on ruby 1.9.3, and the ActiveRecord portion has been tested with Rails 3.2. I don't know off-hand of any reasons that it shouldn't work in other environments, but be aware that it hasn't (yet) been tested.
If Asari interests you and you think you might want to contribute, hit me up on Github. You can also just fork it and make some changes, but there's a better chance that your work won't be duplicated or rendered obsolete if you check in on the current development status first.
Gem requirements/etc. should be handled by Bundler.
Copyright (C) 2012 by Tommy Morgan
Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:
The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.