What is elasticsearch?
The elasticsearch npm package is a client library for interacting with Elasticsearch, a distributed search and analytics engine. This package allows developers to perform a variety of operations such as indexing documents, searching, and managing indices within an Elasticsearch cluster.
What are elasticsearch's main functionalities?
Indexing Documents
This feature allows you to index documents into an Elasticsearch index. The code sample demonstrates how to create a client, connect to an Elasticsearch node, and index a document into 'my-index'.
const { Client } = require('@elastic/elasticsearch');
const client = new Client({ node: 'http://localhost:9200' });
async function run() {
await client.index({
index: 'my-index',
document: {
title: 'Test Document',
content: 'This is a test document.'
}
});
console.log('Document indexed');
}
run().catch(console.log);
Searching Documents
This feature allows you to search for documents within an Elasticsearch index. The code sample demonstrates how to search for documents in 'my-index' where the title matches 'Test'.
const { Client } = require('@elastic/elasticsearch');
const client = new Client({ node: 'http://localhost:9200' });
async function run() {
const result = await client.search({
index: 'my-index',
query: {
match: { title: 'Test' }
}
});
console.log(result.hits.hits);
}
run().catch(console.log);
Managing Indices
This feature allows you to manage indices in Elasticsearch. The code sample demonstrates how to create a new index called 'my-new-index'.
const { Client } = require('@elastic/elasticsearch');
const client = new Client({ node: 'http://localhost:9200' });
async function run() {
await client.indices.create({
index: 'my-new-index'
});
console.log('Index created');
}
run().catch(console.log);
Other packages similar to elasticsearch
mongoose
Mongoose is an ODM (Object Data Modeling) library for MongoDB and Node.js. It provides a schema-based solution to model your application data. While it is similar in that it interacts with a database, it is specific to MongoDB and offers features like schema validation and middleware, which are not provided by the elasticsearch package.
redis
Redis is a fast, open-source, in-memory key-value data store. The redis npm package allows you to interact with a Redis database. While it offers some overlapping functionalities like data storage and retrieval, it is designed for different use cases such as caching and real-time analytics, unlike Elasticsearch which is optimized for full-text search and complex queries.
couchbase
Couchbase is a distributed NoSQL cloud database. The couchbase npm package allows you to interact with a Couchbase server. It offers similar functionalities like indexing and querying documents but is designed for high-performance applications requiring low-latency data access, whereas Elasticsearch is optimized for search and analytics.