The Search web service provides a RESTful API for retrieving product information based on a search term. The Web UI makes calls to this service when a user performs a search. Internally, this service makes calls to an Elasticsearch cluster for search results. When deployed on AWS, Amazon Elasticsearch Service is used. When deployed locally, a local Elasticsearch node is used for searches.
When the Search service and Amazon Elasticsearch are initially deployed to your AWS account, product information is not present in an index and therefore searches from the Web UI will not return results. There are two options for indexing products in Elasticsearch when deploying to AWS. First, when deploying the Retail Demo Store project, the CloudFormation template has an option to index the product catalog in Elasticsearch as part of the deployment process. The second option is to step through the Search workshop.
When deployed to AWS, CodePipeline is used to build and deploy the Search service as a Docker container to Amazon ECS behind an Application Load Balancer. The Search service can also be run locally in a Docker container. This makes it easier to iterate on and test changes locally before commiting.
The Search service can be built and run locally (in Docker) using Docker Compose. See the local development instructions for details. From the ../src directory, run the following command to build and deploy Elasticsearch and the service locally.
foo@bar:~$ docker-compose up --build elasticsearch searchOnce the container is up and running, you can access it in your browser or with a utility such as Postman at http://localhost:8006.
As explained above, when the Search service and Elasticsearch are deployed, the product information does not exist in an Elasticsearch index. When deploying locally, you can use the local_index_products.py script after starting the elasticsearch Docker container to create and load the products index.