How to Set Up Elasticsearch for Full-Text Search

How to Set Up Elasticsearch for Full-Text Search

Elasticsearch is a distributed search and analytics engine built on Apache Lucene. It provides powerful full-text search, structured queries, and real-time analytics capabilities. Running Elasticsearch on your Breeze instances enables your applications to deliver fast, relevant search results across large datasets.

Installing Elasticsearch

On your Breeze instance running Ubuntu or Debian:

wget -qO - https://artifacts.elastic.co/GPG-KEY-elasticsearch | \
  sudo gpg --dearmor -o /usr/share/keyrings/elasticsearch-keyring.gpg
echo "deb [signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/elasticsearch-keyring.gpg] \
  https://artifacts.elastic.co/packages/8.x/apt stable main" | \
  sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/elastic-8.x.list
sudo apt update
sudo apt install -y elasticsearch

During installation, Elasticsearch generates a password for the built-in elastic user. Save this password securely.

Configuration

Edit /etc/elasticsearch/elasticsearch.yml for a single-node setup:

cluster.name: breeze-search
node.name: breeze-es-1
path.data: /var/lib/elasticsearch
path.logs: /var/log/elasticsearch
network.host: 0.0.0.0
http.port: 9200
discovery.type: single-node
xpack.security.enabled: true
xpack.security.http.ssl.enabled: false

For production, allocate JVM heap in /etc/elasticsearch/jvm.options.d/heap.options:

-Xms2g
-Xmx2g

Set heap to 50% of available RAM, but never more than 31 GB. Start and enable the service:

sudo systemctl enable elasticsearch
sudo systemctl start elasticsearch

Creating an Index with Mappings

Define an index with explicit field mappings for your search use case:

curl -X PUT "http://localhost:9200/articles" -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -u elastic:YourPassword -d '{
  "settings": {
    "number_of_shards": 1,
    "number_of_replicas": 0,
    "analysis": {
      "analyzer": {
        "content_analyzer": {
          "type": "custom",
          "tokenizer": "standard",
          "filter": ["lowercase", "stop", "snowball"]
        }
      }
    }
  },
  "mappings": {
    "properties": {
      "title":       { "type": "text", "analyzer": "content_analyzer", "boost": 2.0 },
      "body":        { "type": "text", "analyzer": "content_analyzer" },
      "author":      { "type": "keyword" },
      "tags":        { "type": "keyword" },
      "published_at": { "type": "date" },
      "view_count":  { "type": "integer" }
    }
  }
}'

Indexing Documents

Add documents to your index:

curl -X POST "http://localhost:9200/articles/_doc" -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -u elastic:YourPassword -d '{
  "title": "Getting Started with Breeze Instances",
  "body": "This guide walks you through deploying your first application on a Breeze cloud instance...",
  "author": "admin",
  "tags": ["tutorial", "getting-started"],
  "published_at": "2026-03-01",
  "view_count": 150
}'

Searching Documents

Perform full-text search queries:

curl -X GET "http://localhost:9200/articles/_search" -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -u elastic:YourPassword -d '{
  "query": {
    "bool": {
      "must": {
        "multi_match": {
          "query": "deploy application",
          "fields": ["title^2", "body"],
          "type": "best_fields",
          "fuzziness": "AUTO"
        }
      },
      "filter": [
        { "term": { "author": "admin" } },
        { "range": { "published_at": { "gte": "2026-01-01" } } }
      ]
    }
  },
  "highlight": {
    "fields": {
      "title": {},
      "body": { "fragment_size": 150, "number_of_fragments": 3 }
    }
  },
  "size": 10
}'

Monitoring and Maintenance

Monitor cluster health and index statistics:

# Cluster health
curl -u elastic:YourPassword "http://localhost:9200/_cluster/health?pretty"

# Index statistics
curl -u elastic:YourPassword "http://localhost:9200/articles/_stats?pretty"

# Node resource usage
curl -u elastic:YourPassword "http://localhost:9200/_nodes/stats?pretty"

Elasticsearch on a single Breeze instance can handle millions of documents with sub-second search response times. For larger workloads, scale horizontally by adding more Breeze instances to the cluster and increasing the shard count.