Digital Marketplace Search API

API application for Digital Marketplace.

• Python app, based on the Flask framework

This app handles interactions between the Digital Marketplace apps and our Elasticsearch instance.

Quickstart

It's recommended to use the DM Runner tool, which will install and run the app (and an Elasticsearch instance) as part of the full suite of apps.

If you want to run the app as a stand-alone process, you'll need to set the ELASTICSEARCH_HOST env variable to your own local ES instance.

You can then clone the repo and run:

make run-all

This command will install dependencies and start the app.

By default, the app will be served at http://127.0.0.1:5009.

Local Elasticsearch setup

Install version 6.x of elasticsearch, ideally 6.8 which is what we run on live systems.

brew update
brew install elasticsearch@6.8

Start elasticsearch via brew:

brew services start elasticsearch

See the Developer Manual for more details around local developer setup.

Using the Search API

Calls to the Search API require a valid bearer token. For development environments, this defaults to myToken. An example request to your local search API would therefore be:

curl -i -H "Authorization: Bearer myToken" 127.0.0.1:5009/g-cloud/services/search?q=email

POST requests will require a Content-Type header, set to application/json.

Updating the index mapping

The index mapping is generated using the generate-search-config.py script from the framework question content and mapping templates in the frameworks repository.

For example, to (re-)generate the services mapping for G-cloud 10, you could run

digitalmarketplace-frameworks/scripts/generate-search-config.py g-cloud-10 services > digitalmarketplace-search-api/mappings/g-cloud-10-services.json

Once this has been done the mapping file will need to be committed and the commit released. You can then tell Elasticsearch to use the new mapping.

To use the new mapping you will need to create a new index, it will not be picked up automatically. You can either do this manually by following the steps below, or by using the jobs on Jenkins.

Indexing data

On preview, staging and production, the overnight Jenkins jobs do not create new indices, but instead overwrite whichever index the alias currently points to.

New indices are only created and aliased if the entire data set needs to be reindexed, e.g. following a database reset or a change in the mapping. This is done with two scripts for each framework:

1. index-to-search-service.py

   Create a new index, using the index-name-YYYY-MM-DD pattern for the new index name.

   ./scripts/index-to-search-service.py services dev
                                        --index=g-cloud-9-2018-01-01
                                        --frameworks=g-cloud-9
                                        --create-with-mapping=services
   ./scripts/index-to-search-service.py briefs dev
                                        --index=briefs-digital-outcomes-and-specialists-2018-01-01
                                        --frameworks=digital-outcomes-and-specialists
                                        --create-with-mapping=briefs-digital-outcomes-and-specialists-2
   

2. update-index-alias.py

   Update the alias to point to the new index (that has the date suffix):

   ./scripts/update-index-alias.py g-cloud-9 g-cloud-9-2018-01-01 <search-api-url>
   ./scripts/update-index-alias.py briefs-digital-outcomes-and-specialists briefs-digital-outcomes-and-specialists-2018-01-01 <search-api-url>
   

   This script also deletes the old index.

Testing

Run the full test suite:

make test

To only run the Python tests:

make test-unit

To run the flake8 linter:

make test-flake8

Updating Python dependencies

requirements.txt file is generated from the requirements.in in order to pin versions of all nested dependencies. If requirements.in has been changed (or we want to update the unpinned nested dependencies) requirements.txt should be regenerated with

make freeze-requirements

requirements.txt should be committed alongside requirements.in changes.

Contributing

This repository is maintained by the Digital Marketplace team at the Crown Commercial Service.

If you have a suggestion for improvement, please raise an issue on this repo.

Licence

Unless stated otherwise, the codebase is released under the MIT License. This covers both the codebase and any sample code in the documentation.

The documentation is © Crown copyright and available under the terms of the Open Government 3.0 licence.