July 2014 - The Matrix has you...

Build Zappos like faceted navigation with ElasticSearch

I’ve been looking at different facets implementations while working on REST Search API for my ecommerce store. Some of the solutions I saw were simple to achieve (like plain faceting by terms with single selection), while others required some thinking and some extra work.

Today we will talk about Zappos facets, …

Little trick to get AWS instance_id as variable in Nginx

If you are running in AWS environment it might be useful to get Amazon instance_id in Nginx for different purposes (logging, headers etc).

To do that we need to compile Nginx with Perl support (–with-http_perl_module flag during compilation). After that is done we can put this snippet inside of our httpd Nginx config section:

Important: While the Perl module is performing a long-running operation, …

Use Nginx basic auth to protect HTTP services like Solr

Sometimes it might be useful to add simple permissions layer on top of unprotected HTTP services ( especially if you would like to open those to the public! ). Recently we had to secure our Solrcloud install to be able to provide read only access to our FTS index to a partner, …