Elasticsearch in 20 minutes

Want to setup an Elasticsearch instance, tinker with this technology? Here is a quick and dirty tutorial that will help you to setup an Elasticsearch instance on your computer in less than twenty minutes!

What's Elasticsearch?

If you have an idea of what's Elasticsearch is you can pass this section and go straight to the installation of Elastic.

Elasticsearch ( also called Elastic ) is a database based on Lucene. It's becoming extremely popular since it's free, open-source and makes searches and data analytic easy and in real-time.

While a SQL query might take minutes or event timeout when the database contains too much records, Elasticsearch will scale better and always return a result in milliseconds. I have once tried to empirically compare the performance of both technologies, made a lot of equivalent queries on hundreds of thousands documents on both database. Elastic was overall 3000 faster, but also provided advanced lots of Natural Language Processing features like tokenization, use of n-grams, stop-word removal and many more, making possible the implementation of a google-like full-text search engine on your websites, making search more natural for your visitors.

Installing Elasticsearch

To start you journey with Elasticsearch, just download the software from the official website. When the download is over, just extract the contents of you elasticsearch-x.x.x.zip and go into the resulting folder.

Open a command prompt in the folder and move into the bin directory. Run the elasticsearch script to launch the database.

Your first Elasticsearch instance is now running! In the next tutorials, we will see how to add documents into your Elastic server and unlock the power of real-time full-text searches and analytics.

• Tip: if you get a "Could not find any executable java binary." or "JAVA_HOME environment variable must be set" error, you should install Java and edit your environment variables.