elasticsearch-bblfsh

"Code as data" can be a powerful idea, but I don't think there are many concrete examples. To explore this concept, I used bblfshd to analyze the Elasticsearch code base to get a full list of all the configurable settings in Elasticsearch.

Take a look at the generated settings here.

The problem space

Elasticsearch has a lot of configurable settings and they aren't fully listed anywhere. Some are dynamic, some are not. I wanted to explore how to get all of the settings and their properties to see what I could do.

The main tech

This analysis is powered by bblfshd (pronounced babelfish). It's takes code and produces a "universal abstract syntax tree" (uast) of the code and supports a number of languages. Elasticsearch is written in Java which is one of the provided languages.

Getting up and running

Prereqs

• Is written in go, so you need to have go installed
• Assumes bblfshd is running on localhost:9432, see their docs on getting started
• Need to have a checkout of the Elasticsearch codebase somewhere on disk

Building and running

• cd into cmd/elasticsearch-bblfsh
• go build will make the elasticsearch-bblfsh executable
• ./elasticsearch-bblfsh will create elasticsearchSettings.json with all of the settings found

Caveats

This was a fun experiment for me. I'm very new at writing go code and it's probably all wrong. Use at your own risk.