The Splainer!
The sandbox that explains your search results for you so you don't have to go digging through explain debug! Paste in your Solr or Elasticsearch query URL and go. Try it out here.
Why?
You're a search developer trying to tune search results with Solr or Elasticsearch. You're engaged in search relevancy work.
You're probably stuck with the question of why? Why do search results come back in the order that they do? Solr and Elasticsearch exposes an explain syntax for you to try to explain search scoring. Unfortunately outside the simplest tasks, its a nightmare to read through. There are parsers like explain.solr.pl but they require a lot of manual copy/pasting of explain information to the tool.
Splainer is different by being a sandbox. Paste in your Solr or Elasticsearch URL, query parameters and all. As you work with your query, changing parameters, Splainer shows you parsed and summarized explain information alongside your documents. Continue working and see how the search results change.
Read the blog post introducing Splainer here
Splainer forms the core of the open source tool Quepid that allows you to do this over multiple queries against expert-graded search results to track search changes over a longer period of time.
Using Splainer
Take the tour to see how you'd use Splainer.
Using Splainer locally
We have a Docker image published at https://hub.docker.com/r/o19s/splainer that you can use:
docker run -d -p 9000:9000 o19s/splainer
and then go to http://localhost:9000
Developing Splainer
Npm/Yarn Dev Environment
Splainer is written using AngularJS project. It requires npm, grunt, and yarn.
Be sure you've installed npm, yarn, and grunt on your machine.
- On a Mac follow these instructions
- On Ubuntu follow these instructions
- Use npm to install Grunt globally on your system (may require sudo)
npm install -g grunt-cli
- Install yarn follow these instructions
With Npm/Yarn installed
From the root of the project, you should be able to run the following:
yarn
grunt test
grunt serve
Now browse to http://localhost:9000.
To build the project, simply run grunt dist
to build the static artifacts in the dist/ folder.
grunt dist
You can test out the static artifacts via ruby -run -e httpd -- -p 5000 ./dist
and going to http://localhost:5000.
With Docker installed
From the root of the project, you should run:
docker build -t splainer .
docker run -p 9000:9000 splainer:latest
or use the following shortcuts if you have ruby
installed:
bin/docker b
then to run the server run
bin/docker s
docker-compose
Using From the root of the project,
docker-compose build
docker-compose run --rm --service-ports app
Using Docker Compose to test splainer-search with splainer
docker-compose.override.yml.example
can be copied todocker-compose.override.yml
and use it to override environment variables or work with a local copy of thesplainer-search
JS library during development defined indocker-compose.yml
. Example is included. Just update the path tosplainer-search
with your local checkout!
https://docs.docker.com/compose/extends/
Testing Notes
-
Unit tests are written using Karma.
-
The
./tests/splainer_test_links.html
file is a list of links that invoke Splainer, both the local version and the deployed version against Solr and Elasticsearch, and is a great test to make sure the behavior hasn't reverted. Use this to make sure existing links still work!
Who?
Created by OpenSource Connections.
Thanks to all the community contributors for finding bugs and sharing fixes!.
License
Released under Apache 2