How to install Elasticsearch on Mastodon?

[ei8fdb]

@girish said in How to install Elasticsearch on Mastodon?:

planned to add an elasticsearch addon

As an add-on? Are you hinting at something new? Or did I miss something about Cloudron add-ons?

[nichu42]

The demand for ElasticSearch is about to increase rapidly very soon:
Full text search has just been merged in Mastodon main branch, and will be in the next version 4.2.0 (planned release date: 1st half of September).

https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/pull/26344

[shanelord01]

@nichu42 Completely agree. Perhaps it’s time for a package including both (or at least instructions on hire to set it up).

Personally I’d prefer a one stop all in one install.

[nichu42]

Now that 4.2.0 has been released, what's the plan / progress with ElasticSearch, @girish?

[redegelde]

@nichu42 and when does 4,2 become available .
Great new updates

[nichu42]

@redegelde It already is available on Github. I suppose the Cloudron package will follow shortly. The Cloudron team is usually very quick with providing updates.

[scooke]

I don't blame the Staff for not implementing this (yet). The RAM requirements are simply huge. Even as an add-on, how many users are going to "add this on" and then watch their Cloudron go down in flames. Imagine the Forum then! And then we'll all be asking/demanding/pleading with the Staff to fix it, tweak it, optimize it, "it should be clearer that I need a 16GB ram machine for Cloudron" complaints that will probably even turn into "don't use CLourdon, it's a memory beast" posts here and there. If anything, it would be nice if Cloudron just made it simpler to connect to an ES install.

[nichu42]

@scooke Thanks for the insights. I use Cloudron because it's very easy to use, not to save money. So I'm open to whichever solution they work out. If there won't be a solution from Cloudron, I'd appreciate if the team would let us know. I'd start finding one myself in that case, though that's an adventure I try to avoid.

[girish]

@nichu42 you should already be able to connect an external ES instance. I think this is the best way if you badly need this now.

For integrating with cloudron, ES is a beast with its memory requirements as @scooke pointed out. It will take us a while to get to it and needs much thought. It's not in immediate roadmap.

[nichu42]

@girish Thanks for the clarification!

[girish]

@nichu42 I was just looking at it briefly. In case you go down this route... For some reason, they only support ES7 per https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/26544#issuecomment-1684005007 which is almost https://www.elastic.co/support/eol .

Also, Nextcloud ES integration now requires ES8 which could conflict with the previous ES7 requirement.

Finally, https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/18535 suggests OpenSearch 2.4.x might be supported.

Let me if you come up with something!

[redegelde]

great work.
For the time frame, when will Elasticsearch become avaible or not
i understand this is needed with the 4.2 version

[jdaviescoates]

@redegelde said in How to install Elasticsearch on Mastodon?:

For the time frame, when will Elasticsearch become avaible or not

As @girish said it's not yet on the roadmap, so I don't think it'll really be possible to guesitmate the time frame.

@redegelde said in How to install Elasticsearch on Mastodon?:

i understand this is needed with the 4.2 version

To be clear, it is not required by 4.2 (as in you can use 4.2 without it). But yes, it can be used with 4.2 and the Cloudron package for 4.2 is already available.

[jdaviescoates]

@girish said in How to install Elasticsearch on Mastodon?:

@nichu42 I was just looking at it briefly. In case you go down this route... For some reason, they only support ES7 per https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/26544#issuecomment-1684005007 which is almost https://www.elastic.co/support/eol .

Also, Nextcloud ES integration now requires ES8 which could conflict with the previous ES7 requirement.

Finally, https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/18535 suggests OpenSearch 2.4.x might be supported.

I note that the Mastodon docs do now say:

Mastodon is tested with ElasticSearch version 7. It should support OpenSearch, as well as ElectisSearch versions 6 and 8, but those setups are not officially supported.

(also, I've just submitted a pull request to fix their tiny Elastis typo )

[msbt]

@jdaviescoates in that PR is room for improvement

[nichu42]

Got my ES up and running on a second VPS. In case you want to do the same, this guide was extremely helpful: https://blog.thms.uk/2023/09/mastodon-elasticsearch

[jdaviescoates]

@nichu42 nice one, thanks for sharing!

[shanelord01]

@nichu42 Brilliant stuff.

For me on Linode, all I did extra was to create a VLAN and connect eth1 on my Cloudron to it, as well as eth1 on my Elasticsearch server. Then used this private link to connect the two.

Edit : Actually damn while troublshooting why I was having an issue getting it to work, it seems Cloudron does not recognise multiple NIC/eth interfaces. So I can't have eth1 on a VLAN with a 10.0.0.x/24 address.

See Linode setup here: https://www.linode.com/docs/products/networking/vlans/get-started/

Cloudron via "ip link show" isn't showing the eth1 interface at all. @girish any way to fix this toi make it work?

Edit 2: Make sure to troubleshoot the network.host on the Elasticsearch server and port 9200 is open in iptables - mine was refusing connections for some reason. Working on VLAN now.

[girish]

@shanelord01 Cloudron is just built on top of Ubuntu. We don't do anything to change visibility of network interfaces . All this to say "Cloudron does not recognize multiple NIC" is actually "Linux does recognize multiple NIC" . The issue is either in your networking setup or VM setup or VPS setup . Just giving you some ideas to debug

[shanelord01]

@girish My VM host (when I SSH into it) is showing the eth1 interface correctly via "ip link show"

When I use the Cloudron Terminal under my Mastodon app, it does not show the eth1 interface, only loopback and eth0.

So it is not my host.

Outcome is, Cloudron can't see the VLAN network on Linode - at least nothing is showing in the UI, and I am unable to use ping in the Cloudron terminal for some reason.

I'll keep testing.