Django with postgres and elasticsearch

This project is a seed project/POC to implement Django with postgres and elasticsearch, which means we can use postgres as primary database and elasticsearch as secondary search db. This implementation will update/index the data to the elasticsearch as data is changed and create django sytle api with pagination using elasticsearch backend.

The code uses example_blog as postgres db name and example_blog as index name in elasticsearch.

Why postgres + elasticsearch stack !

• postgres - "The world's most advanced open source database" as their website claims is very well supported by Django and has jsonfield support by django which is awesome. Its suits very well for any application because most of the user facing applications are expected to have a structured data.

• elasticsearch - Elasticsearch is a search engine based on Lucene. It provides a distributed, multitenant-capable full-text search engine. It is very good when the data is huge and you want to have a search API/functionality in your application. You can build a searchengine with it, because it have search tons of data with ease.

How to run

1. create the infrastructure needed and start the machines using cd webapp && docker-compose up.

2. Run the Postgres migrations needed cd webapp && docker-compose run web python manage.py migrate.

3. Create index in elasticsearch cd webapp && docker-compose run web python manage.py search_index --create. This step will be ignored. elasticsearch will create an index when needed anyways.

4. Now the web application is accessible at http://location:8000

5. You should be able to see CRUD operation APIs at http://localhost:8000/blogs/ pointing to the postgres backend

6. You should be able to see List/Search API at http://localhost:8000/blogs-es

Features and todo:

• [*] django with postgres
• [*] CRUD operations - using Restful webservices.
• [*] elasticsearch implementation
• [*] updating elasticsearch as we make changes in postgres db
• [*] Django style search API with elasticsearch backend.
• [*] Dockerfile and docker-compose.yaml

Projects Uses

• Django 1.11
• Elasticsearch 5.6
• Postgres 9.6
• django-elasticsearch-dsl
• django-elasticsearch-dsl-drf

References:

• https://github.com/sabricot/django-elasticsearch-dsl
• https://github.com/barseghyanartur/django-elasticsearch-dsl-drf