Note: Zinc and all its APIs are considered to be alpha stage at this time.
Zinc is a search engine that does full text indexing. It is a lightweight alternative to Elasticsearch and runs in less than 100 MB of RAM. It uses bluge as the underlying indexing library.
It is very simple and easy to operate as opposed to Elasticsearch which requires a couple dozen knobs to understand and tune.
It is a drop-in replacement for Elasticsearch if you are just ingesting data using APIs and searching using kibana (Kibana is not supported with zinc. Zinc provides its own UI).
While Elasticsearch is a very good product, it is complex and requires lots of resources and is more than a decade old. I built Zinc so it becomes easier for folks to use full text search indexing without doing a lot of work.
- Provides full text indexing capability
- Single binary for installation and running. Binaries available under releases for multiple platforms.
- Web UI for querying data written in Vue
- Compatibility with Elasticsearch APIs for ingestion of data (single record and bulk API)
- Out of the box authentication
- Schema less - No need to define schema upfront and different documents in the same index can have different fields.
- High Availability
- Distributed reads and writes
- Geosptial search
- Index storage in memory
- Index storage in s3
Search screen
User management screen
Download / Installation / Run
Binaries
Binaries can be downloaded from releases page for appropriate platform.
Create a data folder that will store the data
$ mkdir data
$ FIRST_ADMIN_USER=admin FIRST_ADMIN_PASSWORD=Complexpass#123 ./zinc
Now point your browser to http://localhost:4080 and login
Docker
$ mkdir data
$ docker run -v /full/path/of/data:/data -e DATA_PATH="/data" -p 4080:4080 -e FIRST_ADMIN_USER=admin -e FIRST_ADMIN_PASSWORD=Complexpass#123 --name zinc public.ecr.aws/m5j1b6u0/zinc:v0.1.1
Now point your browser to http://localhost:4080 and login
Kubernetes
Manual Install
kubectl apply -f kube-deployment.yaml
kubectl -n zinc port-forward svc/z 4080:4080
Now point your browser to http://localhost:4080 and login
Helm
Update Helm values located in values.yaml
Create the namespace:
kubectl create ns zinc
Install the chart:
helm install zinc helm/zinc -n zinc
Zinc can be available with an ingress or port-forward:
kubectl -n zinc port-forward svc/zinc 4080:4080
Data ingestion
Single record
curl example
curl
-u admin:Complexpass#123
-XPUT
-d '{"author":"Prabhat Sharma"}'
http://localhost:4080/api/myshinynewindex/document
Python example
import base64, json import requests user = "admin" password = "Complexpass#123" bas64encoded_creds = base64.b64encode(bytes(user + ":" + password, "utf-8")).decode("utf-8") data = { "Athlete": "DEMTSCHENKO, Albert", "City": "Turin", "Country": "RUS", "Discipline": "Luge", "Event": "Singles", "Gender": "Men", "Medal": "Silver", "Season": "winter", "Sport": "Luge", "Year": 2006 } headers = {"Content-type": "application/json", "Authorization": "Basic " + bas64encoded_creds} index = "games3" zinc_host = "http://localhost:4080" zinc_url = zinc_host + "/api/" + index + "/document" res = requests.put(zinc_url, headers=headers, data=json.dumps(data))
Bulk ingestion
Bulk ingestion API follows same interface as Elasticsearch API defined in documentation.
curl -L https://github.com/prabhatsharma/zinc/releases/download/v0.1.1/olympics.ndjson.gz -o olympics.ndjson.gz
gzip -d olympics.ndjson.gz
curl http://localhost:4080/es/_bulk -i -u admin:Complexpass#123 --data-binary "@olympics.ndjson"
Search
Python example
import base64 import json import requests user = "admin" password = "Complexpass#123" bas64encoded_creds = base64.b64encode( bytes(user + ":" + password, "utf-8")).decode("utf-8") params = { "search_type": "match", "query": { "term": "DEMTSCHENKO", "start_time": "2021-06-02T14:28:31.894Z", "end_time": "2021-12-02T15:28:31.894Z" }, "fields": ["_all"] } # params = { # "search_type": "querystring", # "query": # { # "term": "+City:Turin +Silver", # "start_time": "2021-06-02T14:28:31.894Z", # "end_time": "2021-12-02T15:28:31.894Z" # }, # "fields": ["_all"] # } headers = {"Content-type": "application/json", "Authorization": "Basic " + bas64encoded_creds} index = "games3" zinc_host = "http://localhost:4080" zinc_url = zinc_host + "/api/" + index + "/_search" res = requests.post(zinc_url, headers=headers, data=json.dumps(params)) print(res.text)
Output
{ "took": 0, "timed_out": false, "max_score": 7.6978611753656345, "hits": { "total": { "value": 3 }, "hits": [ { "_index": "games3", "_type": "games3", "_id": "bd3e67f0-679b-4aa4-b0f5-81b9dc86a26a", "_score": 7.6978611753656345, "@timestamp": "2021-10-20T04:56:39.000871Z", "_source": { "Athlete": "DEMTSCHENKO, Albert", "City": "Turin", "Country": "RUS", "Discipline": "Luge", "Event": "Singles", "Gender": "Men", "Medal": "Silver", "Season": "winter", "Sport": "Luge", "Year": 2006 } }, { "_index": "games3", "_type": "games3", "_id": "230349d9-72b3-4225-bac7-a8ab31af046d", "_score": 7.6978611753656345, "@timestamp": "2021-10-20T04:56:39.215124Z", "_source": { "Athlete": "DEMTSCHENKO, Albert", "City": "Sochi", "Country": "RUS", "Discipline": "Luge", "Event": "Singles", "Gender": "Men", "Medal": "Silver", "Season": "winter", "Sport": "Luge", "Year": 2014 } }, { "_index": "games3", "_type": "games3", "_id": "338fea31-81f2-4b56-a096-b8294fb6cc92", "_score": 7.671309826309841, "@timestamp": "2021-10-20T04:56:39.215067Z", "_source": { "Athlete": "DEMTSCHENKO, Albert", "City": "Sochi", "Country": "RUS", "Discipline": "Luge", "Event": "Mixed Relay", "Gender": "Men", "Medal": "Silver", "Season": "winter", "Sport": "Luge", "Year": 2014 } } ] }, "buckets": null, "error": "" }
search_type can have following values:
- alldocuments
- wildcard
- fuzzy
- term
- daterange
- matchall
- match
- matchphrase
- multiphrase
- querystring
Please do raise a PR adding your details if you are using Zinc.