Simple Search Service is an IBM Bluemix app that lets you quickly create a faceted search engine, exposing an API you can use to bring search into your own apps. The service also creates a website that lets you preview the API and test it against your own data.
Once deployed, use the browser to upload CSV or TSV data. Specify the fields to facet, and the service handles the rest.
The application uses these Bluemix services:
- a Node.js runtime
- a Cloudant database
- a Redis in-memory database from Compose.io (Optional)
Once the data is uploaded, a CORS-enabled, cached API endpoint is available at <your domain name>/search. The endpoint takes advantage of Cloudant's built-in integration for Lucene full-text indexing. Here's what you get:
- fielded search -
?q=colour:black+AND+brand:fender - free-text search -
?q=black+fender+strat - pagination -
?q=black+fender+strat&bookmark=<xxx> - faceting
- caching of popular searches
While this app is a demo to showcase how easily you can build an app on Bluemix using Node.js and Cloudant, it also provides a mature search API that scales with the addition of multiple Simple Search Service nodes and a centralized cache using Redis by Compose.io. In fact, a similar architecture powers the search experience in the Bluemix services catalog.
A more detailed walkthrough of using Simple Search Service is available here.
The fastest way to deploy this application to Bluemix is to click the Deploy to Bluemix button below.
Don't have a Bluemix account? If you haven't already, you'll be prompted to sign up for a Bluemix account when you click the button. Sign up, verify your email address, then return here and click the the Deploy to Bluemix button again. Your new credentials let you deploy to the platform and also to code online with Bluemix and Git. If you have questions about working in Bluemix, find answers in the Bluemix Docs.
Clone this repository then run npm install to add the Node.js libraries required to run the app.
Then create an environment variable that store your Cloudant URL:
export SSS_URL='https://USERNAME:PASSWORD@HOSTNAME'replacing the USERNAME, PASSWORD and HOSTNAME placeholders for your own Cloudant account's details.
Then run:
node app.jsIf you have uploaded your content into the Simple Search Service but now want only the /search endpoint to continue working, then you can enable "Lockdown mode".
Simply set an environment variable called LOCKDOWN to true before running the Simple Search Service:
export LOCKDOWN=true
node app.jsor set a custom environment variable in Bluemix.
When lockdown mode is detected, all web requests will be get a 403 response except the /search endpoint which will continue to work. This prevents your data being modified until lockdown mode is switched off again, by removing the environment variable.
The Simple Search Service web application includes code to track deployments to Bluemix and other Cloud Foundry platforms. The following information is sent to a Deployment Tracker service on each deployment:
- Application Name (
application_name) - Space ID (
space_id) - Application Version (
application_version) - Application URIs (
application_uris)
This data is collected from the VCAP_APPLICATION environment variable in IBM Bluemix and other Cloud Foundry platforms. This data is used by IBM to track metrics around deployments of sample applications to IBM Bluemix. Only deployments of sample applications that include code to ping the Deployment Tracker service will be tracked.
For manual deploys, deployment tracking can be disabled by removing require("cf-deployment-tracker-client").track(); from the end of the app.js main server file.
Copyright 2016 IBM Cloud Data Services
Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License"); you may not use this file except in compliance with the License. You may obtain a copy of the License at
http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0
Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied. See the License for the specific language governing permissions and limitations under the License.