Elasticsearch version limited to version 7.9 or 7.10

[BernardZijlstra]

Hi,

I have a question about the upper supported Elasticsearch versions for Elasticpress as stated by the supported versions table inside the changelog. Are there technical reasons for a current version 7.17.x of Elasticsearch to break code within ElasticPress?

ElasticPress 4.0.X has 7.10 as upper version of Elasticsearch
ElasticPress 3.6.6 has 7.9 as upper version of Elasticsearch
Current Elasticsearch 7 version is 7.17.1

[nickchomey]

There's also version 8 (8.1.1 currently), which would be quite understandable to be incompatible, but I'm still curious about the differences anyway

[felipeelia]

Hi there! The main reason why it is currently set as 7.10 is that we focused on the release of ElasticPress 4.0 in the last months and that prevented us from putting in the necessary effort to properly test it with more recent versions. The Elasticsearch license change and the OpenSearch fork also played a part here.

That said, we do expect the plugin works with both Elasticsearch 7.17 and OpenSearch (I'd also expect it works with ES 8.x but a deprecated functionality could break it, for example.)

We are always interested in the results of user tests, so if any of you have the time to test please let us know. If you find a bug and come up with a solution, a Pull Request is more than welcome.

Thanks!

[coenjacobs]

This question originated from one of our recent projects using ElasticPress. We've since updated our Elasticsearch instance all the way up to 7.17.1 and have found no notable issues with regards to ElasticPress. I can't vouch for it being 100% compatible yet (as we probably haven't touched all parts of the plugin), but we've not encountered any incompatibilities so far.

[mmgc84]

Hi there @felipeelia
I'm using WordPress 6.0.1 and ElasticPress4.2.0 and I have been running tests using OpenSearch 1.2.4 and OpenSearch 1.3.1

While using both OpenSearch versions I'm running into a Mapping error which apparently is an incompatibility

Noticing the error via terminal using with wp cli:
Via terminal wp elasticpress index --setup --skip-themes NO error is shown but there is one (is just not showing). If you then check the index health using the elastic press dashboard you will notice that there is NO information on the index.

root@kzE-opensearchtestsite:/www/opensearchtestsite_776/public# sudo wp elasticpress index --setup --skip-themes --yes --allow-root
Success: Indexing posts...

Noticing the error with the GUI in the ElasticPress dashboard:
To watch the error go to ElasticPress (Plugin Dashboard) > Sync > Clic the button Delete all Data and Start a Fresh Sync and click Show log

Deleting data…
Indexing posts...
Mapping failed
Processed posts 0 - 5 of 5. Last Object ID: 1
Number of posts indexed: 5
Sync complete

As you can see Line 3 shows: Mapping failed

How would this affect a search: Right now post_date_gmt is of type "text".
In Elasticsearch, a put mapping is optional. If we index data without a mapping, Elasticsearch will infer data types, resulting in a “text” type. Elasticsearch will throw an error since we are ordering by date on a text field.

root@kzE-opensearchtestsite:/www/opensearchtestsite_776/public# curl -XGET http://localhost:9200/opensearchtestsite-post-1/_mapping?pretty
[SNIP]
"post_date_gmt" : {
"type" : "text",
[SNIP]

According to this article, Put mapping can fail for a number of reasons. In order to trace down the problem, I was advise to run wp elasticpress put-mapping then debug the result of that request to trace down the point of failure.

root@kzE-opensearchtestsite:/www/opensearchtestsite_776/public# sudo wp elasticpress put-mapping --allow-root
Adding post mapping...
Error: Mapping failed

OpenSearch trows this (Same output 1.2.4 and 1.3.1) :
[2022-07-12T23:22:02,764][INFO ][o.o.c.m.MetadataDeleteIndexService] [wooboost] [opensearchtestsite-post-1/UOggeDFER7quMKHeLlQP1Q] deleting index
[2022-07-12T23:22:02,791][ERROR][o.o.i.i.ManagedIndexCoordinator] [wooboost] get managed-index failed: [.opendistro-ism-config] IndexNotFoundException[no such index [.opendistro-ism-config]]

I remain attentive to your comments and instructions

[felipeelia]

Hi @mmgc84, OpenSearch users need the snippet we've recently added to our docs: http://10up.github.io/ElasticPress/tutorial-compatibility.html
ElasticPress 4.2.1+ should show you a warning with a link to that page. Thanks for the detailed comment!

[mmgc84]

@felipeelia thanks for your quick response.
Question: Do you know in which file I should add this snippet?

Thanks in advance

[felipeelia]

@mmgc84 you could either add it to your theme's functions.php, to a new custom plugin or use a plugin like Insert PHP Code Snippet.

[mmgc84]

Hi @felipeelia , thanks for your help.
I confirm that using the snippet fixes the issue I was having :)

[nickchomey]

FYI, I just installed ES 8.3 and so far basic operations seem to be working fine (which really shouldn't be surprising). I'll be poking around with the new NLP-related stuff (https://www.elastic.co/virtual-events/introduction-to-nlp-models-and-vector-search), so will report if I find any conflicts.