How to build a real-time search function using PHP and Elasticsearch

How to build real-time search capabilities using PHP and Elasticsearch

Elasticsearch is an open source distributed search engine that can be used to retrieve and analyze large amounts of data quickly and efficiently. And PHP is a popular scripting language commonly used for web development. This article will introduce how to use PHP and Elasticsearch to build real-time search functions.

Step 1: Install and configure Elasticsearch

First you need to install the Elasticsearch server. You can download the installation package for the corresponding operating system from the official website and install it according to the official documentation. After the installation is complete, you need to modify the Elasticsearch configuration file elasticsearch.yml, for example:

cluster.name: my-cluster

Modify cluster.name to the customized cluster name.

Step 2: Create indexes and mappings

In Elasticsearch, data is organized into one or more indexes. Each index contains multiple types, and each type contains multiple documents. First you need to create an index and define its mapping.

You can use Elasticsearch's RESTful API to create indexes and mappings. Create an index by sending a PUT request to a specified endpoint on the server.

For example, assuming we want to create an index named "products", we can use the following code:

<?php

$ch = curl_init();

$url = 'http://localhost:9200/products';

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_PUT, true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);

$response = curl_exec($ch);

curl_close($ch);

echo $response;
?>

This code uses the curl library to send a PUT request to the Elasticsearch server, specifying the index URL. By setting the CURLOPT_PUT option to true, we tell the curl library to send a PUT request. Finally, the request is sent by executing the curl_exec function.

Similar to the way of creating an index, you can also use a PUT request to create an index mapping.

Step 3: Index documents

After creating the index and defining the mapping, you can index the documents. A document is the basic unit in Elasticsearch. It is a JSON object that contains a set of fields.

For example, if we want to index a document named "product1", we can use the following code:

<?php

$ch = curl_init();

$url = 'http://localhost:9200/products/product/1';

$data = '{
  "title": "Product 1",
  "description": "This is product 1"
}';

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_CUSTOMREQUEST, 'PUT');
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $data);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);

$response = curl_exec($ch);

curl_close($ch);

echo $response;
?>

This code uses the curl library to send a PUT request to the Elasticsearch server, specifying the URL of the document . A document's URL consists of the index name, type, and document ID. The data part is a JSON string containing title and description fields.

Similar to the way of indexing documents, you can also use PUT requests to update documents.

Step 4: Search documents

After the documents have been indexed, you can use Elasticsearch’s search function to retrieve the documents.

For example, if we want to search for documents whose title field contains the keyword "product", we can use the following code:

<?php

$ch = curl_init();

$url = 'http://localhost:9200/products/_search';

$data = '{
  "query": {
    "match": {
      "title": "product"
    }
  }
}';

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $data);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);

$response = curl_exec($ch);

curl_close($ch);

echo $response;
?>

This code uses the curl library to send a POST request to the Elasticsearch server, specifying the search URL. The searched URL consists of the index name and _search. The data part is a JSON string containing query conditions.

Step 5: Process the search results

As needed, the returned search results can be further processed. Search results are returned in JSON format, which can be parsed and displayed as needed.

For example, we can use the following code to parse the JSON results and display the search results:

<?php

$response = json_decode($response, true);

$hits = $response['hits']['hits'];

foreach ($hits as $hit) {
  $source = $hit['_source'];
  $title = $source['title'];
  $description = $source['description'];

  echo "Title: $title
";
  echo "Description: $description
";
  echo "
";
}
?>

This code first converts the search results into an associative array and then extracts the title and description of each document fields and display them.

Through the above steps, we can use PHP and Elasticsearch to build a real-time search function. By configuring the Elasticsearch server, creating indexes and mappings, indexing documents, and searching documents, we can build a powerful real-time search engine.

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