16 December 2013, 16:45

Hello...

I'm using Mahara 1.8.0 downloaded from mahara.org on Ubuntu 12.04.3 LTS with postgresql 9.1.

My question involves mahara's use of Elasticsearch -- please excuse me if my question is elementary. I want to enable full text search, so I downloaded Elasticsearch (the .deb package) and installed it. I configured mahara to use Elasticsearch. I can see that mahara is communicating with the Elasticsearch server because my curl query to Elasticsearch shows the correct list of artefacts.

But when I try to search in the search field in mahara, I get an error. The apache error_log shows several lines of errors, but I think the important part is

analyzer [mahara_analyzer] not found

I'm not really clear on what the analyzer is, what role it plays, where it should be found, and how to troubleshoot the problem. If anyone has pointers I'd be grateful. Thanks--

23 December 2013, 12:00

Hi Steve,

The analyzer is a data structure used by Elasticsearch as part of the search query. Mahara automatically creates the "mahara_analyzer" analyzer as well as all the other data structures it needs in Elasticsearch, when you enable the Elasticsearch search plugin. It does through Elasticsearch's REST interface, the same interface it uses for loading data into Elasticsearch and for running search queries.

In your case, it apparently failed to create it. You can tell Mahara to try to re-create the analyzer and everything else, by clicking the "Reset ALL Indexes" button on the Elasticsearch plugin's configuration page "Administration -> Extensions -> Plugin administration -> Plugin type:search -> elasticsearch -> Configuration"

If you see any error messages when you press the "Reset ALL Indexes" button, those should help you to determine what's going wrong. Most likely it's a problem with Mahara communicating with your Elasticsearch instance.

Cheers,

Aaron

28 December 2013, 3:31

Thanks Aaron -- that makes perfect sense -- I think the problem was that I didn't have Elasticsearch running properly at the time that I enabled the plugin. I appreciate your help.