Searchkick VS ransack

Yesterday, I worked on elasticsearch integration with help of searchkick.

I run a large scale production application that does something along these lines. If the data needs to be close to real-time, I'd say use `searchkick` + Elasticsearch, and use `searchkick`'s async feature to "stream" the data from your table to the ES index. Your dashboard will then just query from the ES index via searchkick.

You're right, that's actually what we implemented, application-level hooks, but they needed development and maintenance effort that come for free with the adapter we're using for OpenSearch integration, which also comes with welcome features: synonyms, partial matches, and many others.

Spoiler, the adapter is Searchkick: https://github.com/ankane/searchkick

Searchkick

Normally for Rails applications you would use a gem like searchkick since it greatly reduces the initial Elasticsearch complexity.

We lean heavily on Elasticsearch at CompanyCam. One of it's primary use cases is serving our highly filterable project feed. It is incredibly fast, even when you apply multiple filters to your query and are searching a largish data set. Our primary interface for interacting with Elasticsearch is using the Searchkick gem. Searchkick is a powerhouse and provides so many features out of the box. One place where we bump up against the edges is when trying to reindex a large collection.

Convinced? Ok read on and I’ll show you what switching from Elasticsearch to Meilisearch looked like for a real production app — ScribeHub. We also moved from Ankane’s excellent Searchkick gem to the first party meilisearch-rails gem and I’ll show you the changes there as well.

If you want to use a look-aside pattern (like you might have used with Searchkick + Elasticsearch), you should check out ActiveStash: https://github.com/cipherstash/activestash

You might be looking for something like Ransack - https://github.com/activerecord-hackery/ransack

I use ransack for this and find it very powerful and flexible without the need to rely on complex JS.

For especially complicated cases, you can consider learning how to create custom predicates and Ransackers - extensions that convert parameters directly into Arel (internal library ActiveRecord, used to build SQL queries).

You can use gems like Ransack to build search forms much faster, but for the purpose of learning and performance we will be building this feature ourselves. Throughout the process, you will also learn how to customize Rails default pluralization. By the end, we will be able to search for Pokemon by name, type, and region.