ElasticSearch works only for single viewer

[JRtechw]

Flare version 2022 build .20734
Windows 10
Publishing to Azure VM through DevOps pipelines

Long shot, but I'm experiencing a very odd issue.

I've finally been granted a full Virtual Machine in our Azure subscription to host our knowledge bases, which means I can integrate ElasticSearch. Everything is successfully published to the new VM, including the Content/ContentServices folder that gets created in the output for ElasticSearch-enabled projects.

When I view the knowledge base in a browser (any browser), I get the lovely ElasticSearch dropdown options from the search bars throughout the project. Everything working as it should.

However... no one else can. Not one other tester could see the search dropdown options appear for them when they viewed the test site in a browser. Only me. I'm not even sure how this is possible to be honest. Elasticsearch doesnt require any localled installed components. There is no difference between my PC and the other testers' PCs, they're all pretty locked down by our IT.

Has anyone who's attempted to roll out ElasticSearch come across this before? Many thanks for any ideas.

[JRtechw]

Turns out everything wasn't being successfully published to the destination, so the files on the VM were pointing at 'localhost' when inspected in the browser and not the VM address. Great if you've got a local elasticsearch server running.

Getting ElasticSearch up and running is definitely pretty tricky and I'm pretty sure I've made every possible mistake there is setting it up, so if anyone is having trouble and feels like some troubleshooting ideas, let me know.

[Chris B]

I'm at my wits end with trying to get Elasticsearch up and running. I've been trying for weeks now to publish an Elasticsearch site but no luck. I think I've got everything on the server setup correctly, at least according to the instructions. Whenever I try to publish it gets 99% through the process and then errors out with a Error 413 Payload too large error which is really no help whatsoever. Any idea where I may have gone wrong?

Thanks,

Chris

[JRtechw]

Hi Chris,

It certainly helps to have an IIS or Apache savvy resource handy when setting up Elasticsearch. The configuration instructions are better than they used to be, but rely on an 'ideal' environment to publish to rather than a modern secure locked-down SSL-enforced web server.

Unfortunately, I didn't come across that error during my own troubles. 'Payload too large' is a new one to me.

I'm sure you've done your own searching on the issue, which *seems* to be pushing up a file larger than permitted as configured in IIS https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/answe ... large.html. If you have an IIS guru available, they can help pin down which setting you can tweak and retry.

I'm assuming that you can publish successfully with Elasticsearch turned off? Turning Elasticsearch on creates a new output folder under the Content folder, ContentServices, containing search data and clean topic equivalents. You could check this folder for abnormally large files, but none in here should be enormous, they are just all text files.

[Chris B]

Turns out that a rather large PDF file that is included in the output was being indexed and failing to transfer during the process. Once I eliminated the PDF from the output things started functioning more or less as expected.

Now the real question is, can this be deployed on Azure? Have you had experience with that?

Thanks,

Chris

[JRtechw]

Yep, we deploy to an Azure Virtual Machine. We migrated from an Azure web app. A web app is much easier to manage from an IT point of view, as you don't need to maintain an operating system, but it's a pure sandbox environment and we found we just could not install the required ElasticSearch components on a web app service. [If anyone has actually managed to do this, let me know.]

There is slightly more subscription cost and maintenance overhead for a full VM, but IMO it's well worth it. A web app is too limited to do much more than serve static web pages. It's also much easier configuring IIS through the IIS Manager GUI, which is no longer supported for web apps.

We publish through a DevOps pipeline from DevOps git repositories.

Let me know if you have any questions.