Enhanced Search

What OS is running on your sever ?

Ubuntu v20.04.6

I assume this tutorial is still relevant.

Unless it's a more active community, you can get by with just using a docker container for most sites I've seen. It's when you start getting into medium to big board territory when you shouldn't.

It takes 1/2-1GB to run decently. Elasticsearch uses Java which is a bit heavy.

As to your unanswered question whether Elasticsearch is free. It is for you, the admin. They only charge hosting providers for using it so as an example Amazon Web Services "forked" the free Elasticsearch and call it Opensearch (which itself is also free).

I strongly believe for the regular forum admin it is the best way to use the repositories from its OS, for Ubuntu this is called apt. Get the "repository" for your apt then use a command like "apt install elasticsearch" and whenever you upgrade your OS like "apt update", also Elasticsearch is always upgraded.

Before installing Elasticsearch my suggestion is to first upgrade to Ubuntu 24.04

Marcus said:

It takes 1/2-1GB to run decently. Elasticsearch uses Java which is a bit heavy.

As to your unanswered question whether Elasticsearch is free. It is for you, the admin. They only charge hosting providers for using it so as an example Amazon Web Services "forked" the free Elasticsearch and call it Opensearch (which itself is also free).

I strongly believe for the regular forum admin it is the best way to use the repositories from its OS, for Ubuntu this is called apt. Get the "repository" for your apt then use a command like "apt install elasticsearch" and whenever you upgrade your OS like "apt update", also Elasticsearch is always upgraded.

Before installing Elasticsearch my suggestion is to first upgrade to Ubuntu 24.04

Click to expand...

Thanks. I’ve installed ES and I’m pretty satisfied with it. Haven’t upgraded Ubuntu yet. Still need to see if that goes without trouble.

Awesome ! Usually the updates for Linux are very smooth. You can do #apt update and #do-release-upgrade to get to the latest version. XenForo also would really like you to have the latest PHP. Makes coding much easier with the newer functions etc.

I don't think enhanced search is really necessary until your site gets really huge. After that, just not having to store the search table in the database is worth it. It makes database dumps much smaller and quicker. I don't backup the elastic search. In the event of a failure or data loss, the search table can either be rebuilt or the ES index can be rebuilt. No need to back it up. That's honestly the biggest benefit, IMHO.

Edit: I guess I should clarify. If you are using a feature that requires the ES then that's a different story. We don't usually so the above is the biggest benefit.

First integration of Elasticsearch (ES) was for another forum software and the developer asked $1000 for a license of "Searchlight". It was meant for big boards. The search within SQL was not good at that time. Since a year or so XenForo uses a new SQL search, so every single XenForo installation since then already has access to maybe 80% of what ES does (for a small board). You get the cool search features which maybe are easy to implement with ES but difficult with SQL search. You can backup the database and also single out tables which you do not want to have included, but it is another parameter to add. I think ES is a huge overhead as you need to install Java. All of XenForo is in php now you need to install like a webserver a new Java and ESis another service you have to babysit. For all of this the integrated XenForo Cloud does make sense.

ekool said:

I don't think enhanced search is really necessary until your site gets really huge. After that, just not having to store the search table in the database is worth it. It makes database dumps much smaller and quicker. I don't backup the elastic search. In the event of a failure or data loss, the search table can either be rebuilt or the ES index can be rebuilt. No need to back it up. That's honestly the biggest benefit, IMHO.

Edit: I guess I should clarify. If you are using a feature that requires the ES then that's a different story. We don't usually so the above is the biggest benefit.

Click to expand...

The most interesting feature to me is the similar threads it comes with. I know AndyB has an add on for it, but out of experience, it doesn't quite give the most accurate results compared to ES. And the add on only costs like 60USD, so if that gives better search results, then I'm all for it, small or big board, doesn't matter.

Marcus said:

Awesome ! Usually the updates for Linux are very smooth. You can do #apt update and #do-release-upgrade to get to the latest version. XenForo also would really like you to have the latest PHP. Makes coding much easier with the newer functions etc.

Click to expand...

Thank you. I know how to update, I just need to verify php packages if nothing has changed that could break any website I'm running. We're already running the latest PHP, MySQL, etc. Just our OS is a bit outdated.