Setting Up Search

Tardis comes with a single search option which provides users with a search field that returns a list of matching Experiments, Datasets and Datafiles.

The single search box uses Elasticsearch, with a django-haystack frontend, and accordingly requires some setup. The single search box is disabled by default.

Setting up Elasticsearch

Elasticsearch doesn’t work out of the box with MyTardis. It is not currently installed with pip and requires a number of manual steps to get working.

Elasticsearch can be found here: https://www.elastic.co/products/elasticsearch

The following are a very simple list of steps that will get everything up and running. It is advisable to follow up with the person responsible for overseeing security policy at your home institution to see if any extra setup is necessary.

Django Configuration

Enabling Single Search

A list of default settings for Single Search are already in default_settings.py in the MyTardis repository. Single search is enabled by setting the SINGLE_SEARCH_ENABLED option to True.

Other settings are shown below:

HAYSTACK_CONNECTIONS

The default value is

HAYSTACK_CONNECTIONS = {
     'default': {
         'ENGINE': 'haystack.backends.elasticsearch_backend.'
                   'ElasticsearchSearchEngine',
         'URL': 'http://127.0.0.1:9200/',
         'INDEX_NAME': 'haystack',
     },
 }

HAYSTACK_SIGNAL_PROCESSOR

This setting determines when the information in Elasticsearch is updated. The default value updates it in real time with db changes

HAYSTACK_SIGNAL_PROCESSOR = 'haystack.signals.RealtimeSignalProcessor'

A more performant implementation would trigger an update task on each db change.

Please see django-haystack documentation for further information: http://haystacksearch.org

Updating Indexes

Once Elasticsearch is set up, and Single Search is enabled (i.e. the SINGLE_SEARCH_ENABLED option in settings is set to True) Haystack will automatically register the addition of and changes to models and reflect these in the search index. That is, as soon as a new instance of a model is added to the database, or changes are made to an existing isntance, these changes will be searchable.

If you’re adding search to an existing deployment of Django then you’ll need to manually trigger a rebuild of the indexes (automatic indexing only happens through signals when models are added or changed).

Haystack registers a number of management commands with the Django framework, the important one here being the rebuild_index command. To rebuild, navigate to your checkout and call the following command

python manage.py rebuild_index

Haystack will then ask you to confirm your decision (Note: Rebuilding will destroy your existing indexes, and will take a while for large datasets, so be sure), and then start rebuilding.