Searchlight Plugin Documentation

The search service determines the types of information that is searchable via a plugin mechanism.

Installing Plugins

Plugins must be registered in setup.cfg.

Within setup.cfg the setting within [entry_points] named searchlight.index_backend should list the plugin for each available indexable type. After making a change, it’s necessary to re-install the python package (for instance with pip install -e .).

Each plugin registered in setup.cfg is enabled by default. Typically it should only be necessary to modify setup.cfg if you are installing a new plugin. It is not necessary to modify [entry_points] to temporarily enable or disable installed plugins. Once they are installed, they can be disabled, enabled and configured in the searchlight.conf file.

Configuring Plugins

After installation, plugins are configured in searchlight.conf.

Note

After making changes to searchlight.conf you must perform the actions indicated in the tables below.

  1. Restart services: Restart all running searchlight-api and searchlight-listener processes.
  2. Re-index affected types: You will need to re-index any resource types affected by the change. (See Searchlight Indexing).

Note

Unless you are changing to a non-default value, you do not need to specify any of the following configuration options.

End to End Configuration Example

The following shows a sampling of various configuration options in searchlight.conf. These are NOT necessarily recommended or default configuration values. They are intended for exemplary purposes only. Please read the rest of the guide for detailed information.:

[resource_plugin]
resource_group_name = searchlight

[resource_plugin:os_nova_server]
enabled = True
admin_only_fields = OS-EXT-SRV*,OS-EXT-STS:vm_state

[resource_plugin:os_glance_image]
enabled = True

[resource_plugin:os_glance_metadef]
enabled = True

[resource_plugin:os_cinder_volume]
enabled = True

[resource_plugin:os_cinder_snapshot]
enabled = True

[resource_plugin:os_neutron_net]
enabled = True
admin_only_fields=admin_state_up,status

[resource_plugin:os_neutron_port]
enabled = True

[resource_plugin:os_designate_zone]
enabled = False

[resource_plugin:os_designate_recordset]
enabled = False

[resource_plugin:os_swift_account]
enabled = False

[resource_plugin:os_swift_container]
enabled = False

[resource_plugin:os_swift_object]
enabled = False

Common Plugin Configuration Options

There are common configuration options that all plugins honor. They are split between global, inheritable and non-inheritable options.

Global plugin configuration options apply to all plugins and cannot be overridden by an individual plugin.

Inheritable common configuration options may be specified in a default configuration group of [resource_plugin] in searchlight.conf and optionally overridden in a specific plugin’s configuration. For example:

[resource_plugin]
notifications_topic = searchlight_indexer

[resource_plugin:os_nova_server]
notifications_topic = searchlight_indexer_nova

Non-Inheritable common configuration options are honored by all plugins, but must be specified directly in that plugin’s configuration group. They are not inherited from the [resource_plugin] configuration group. For example:

[resource_plugin:os_glance_image]
enabled = false

Notification topics are a special case. It is possible to override the notification topic as a shared setting; it is also possible to override <topic>,<exchange> pairs per-plugin in the case where some services are using different topics. For instance, in a setup where (for example) neutron is using a separate notification topic:

[resource_plugin]
notifications_topic = searchlight_indexer

[resource_plugin:os_nova_server]
notifications_topics_exchanges = searchlight_indexer,nova
notifications_topics_exchanges = another-topic,neutron

If you override one service topic, you must provide topic,exchange pairs for all service notifications a plugin supports.

See Individual Plugin Configuration for more information and examples on individual plugin configuration.

Global Configuration Options

Option Default value Description Action(s) Required
resource_group_name searchlight Determines the ElasticSearch index and alias where documents will be stored. Index names will be suffixed with a timestamp.
Restart services

Re-index all types

Inheritable Common Configuration Options

Option Default value Description Action(s) Required
mapping_use_
doc_values
true Use doc_values to store documents rather than fieldata. doc_values has some advantages, particularly around memory usage.
Full re-index
notifications_topic
searchlight_
indexer
The oslo.messaging topic on which services send notifications. Each plugin defines a list of exchanges to which it will subscribe.
Restart listener

Non-Inheritable Common Configuration Options

Option Default value Description Action(s) Required
enabled true An installed plugin may be enabled (true) or disabled (false). When disabled, it will not be available for bulk indexing, notification listening, or searching.
Restart services
Re-index affected types
admin_only_fields <none> A comma separated list of fields (wildcards allowed) that are only visible to administrators, and only searchable by administrators. Non- administrative users will not be able to see or search on these fields. These fields are typically specified for search performance, search accuracy, or security reasons. or security reasons. If a plugin has a hard-coded mapping for a specific field, it will take precedence over this configuration option.
Restart services
Re-index affected types
notifications_
topics_exchanges
<none> Override topic,exchange pairs (see note above). Use when services output notifications on dissimilar topics.
Restart services

Individual Plugin Configuration

Individual plugins may also be configured in searchlight.conf.

Note

Plugin configurations are typically named based on their resource type. The configuration name uses the following naming pattern:

  • The resource type name changed to all lower case
  • All :: (colons) converted into _ (underscores).

For example: OS::Glance::Image –> [resource_plugin:os_glance_image]

To override a default configuration option on a specific plugin, you must specify a configuration group for that plugin with the option(s) that you want to override. For example, if you wanted to just disable the Glance image plugin, you would add the following configuration group:

[resource_plugin:os_glance_image]
enabled = false

Each plugin may have additional configuration options specific to it. Information about those configuration options will be found in documentation for that plugin.

Finally, each integrated service (Glance, Nova, etc) may require additional configuration settings. For example, typically, you will need to add the searchlight_indexer notification topic to each service’s configuration in order for Searchlight to receive incremental updates from that service.

Note

In Newton, notification messaging pools will become the default recommended configuration, which does not require changing any service configurations beyond enabling notifications.

To enable the use of notification pools instead of a separate topic, add the notifications_pool option in the listener section of searchlight.conf. There is no need in this case to add an additional topic. Messages will begin to be delivered to the pool after searchlight-listener has started.

Please review each plugin’s documentation for more information: