Elasticsearch/OpenSearch Setup for Magento 2 Search

Configuring Elasticsearch/OpenSearch for Magento 2 Search

Starting from Magento 2.4.0, MySQL search is completely removed from the core — Elasticsearch or OpenSearch are mandatory. Version 2.4.6+ officially supports Elasticsearch 8.x and OpenSearch 2.x. Proper search infrastructure configuration directly impacts conversion: result relevance, response speed, and cluster stability under load.

Version Compatibility

OpenSearch is preferred for new projects: Apache 2.0 license, active development, compatible API.

OpenSearch Installation for Production

Recommended approach — Docker or package installation on separate server:

# docker-compose.yml for development
services:
  opensearch:
    image: opensearchproject/opensearch:2.11.0
    environment:
      - discovery.type=single-node
      - DISABLE_SECURITY_PLUGIN=true
      - OPENSEARCH_JAVA_OPTS=-Xms2g -Xmx2g
    ports:
      - "9200:9200"
    ulimits:
      memlock:
        soft: -1
        hard: -1
    volumes:
      - opensearch-data:/usr/share/opensearch/data

For production cluster minimum — 3 nodes (1 master + 2 data):

# /etc/opensearch/opensearch.yml (data node)
cluster.name: magento-search
node.name: data-node-1
node.roles: [data, ingest]
network.host: 0.0.0.0
discovery.seed_hosts: ["master-node:9300"]
cluster.initial_cluster_manager_nodes: ["master-node"]
path.data: /var/lib/opensearch
path.logs: /var/log/opensearch

# Performance
indices.memory.index_buffer_size: 20%
thread_pool.write.queue_size: 1000

Connecting Magento to OpenSearch

bin/magento config:set catalog/search/engine opensearch
bin/magento config:set catalog/search/opensearch_server_hostname 127.0.0.1
bin/magento config:set catalog/search/opensearch_server_port 9200
bin/magento config:set catalog/search/opensearch_index_prefix magento2
bin/magento config:set catalog/search/opensearch_enable_auth 0
bin/magento config:set catalog/search/opensearch_server_timeout 15

bin/magento indexer:reindex catalogsearch_fulltext
bin/magento cache:flush

Checking index status:

curl -X GET "localhost:9200/_cat/indices/magento2*?v&pretty"
curl -X GET "localhost:9200/magento2_product_1/_mapping?pretty" | head -80

Magento 2 Index Structure

Magento creates index with alias schema: magento2_product_1 (active) and magento2_product_1_v2 (during reindexing). This allows zero-downtime reindex via alias swap.

Custom attribute mapping in index is managed via Magento\Elasticsearch\Model\Adapter\FieldMapper. Custom attributes marked as searchable or filterable are automatically included:

// Custom field mapper for specific types
class CustomFieldMapper extends FieldMapper
{
    public function getFieldName($attributeCode, $context = [])
    {
        if ($attributeCode === 'ean_code') {
            return 'keyword_ean_code'; // exact match
        }
        return parent::getFieldName($attributeCode, $context);
    }
}

Relevance and Analyzer Configuration

Default Magento analyzer suits English. For Russian language, morphological analyzer is needed — analysis-icu or analysis-morphology plugin:

# Install plugin for OpenSearch
bin/opensearch-plugin install analysis-icu

# Or for Elasticsearch
bin/elasticsearch-plugin install analysis-icu

Custom analyzer for Russian via index settings:

PUT /magento2_product_1/_settings
{
  "analysis": {
    "analyzer": {
      "russian_search": {
        "type": "custom",
        "tokenizer": "standard",
        "filter": ["lowercase", "russian_stop", "russian_stemmer"]
      }
    },
    "filter": {
      "russian_stop": {
        "type": "stop",
        "stopwords": "_russian_"
      },
      "russian_stemmer": {
        "type": "stemmer",
        "language": "russian"
      }
    }
  }
}

Monitoring and Troubleshooting

Key metrics to monitor:

• Heap usage — no higher than 75% of -Xmx. On OutOfMemoryError increase heap or add nodes.
• Search latency — p95 < 200ms for product search
• Indexing rate — monitor during bulk product import

# Check cluster health
curl localhost:9200/_cluster/health?pretty

# Slow queries
curl -X PUT "localhost:9200/magento2_product_1/_settings" -H 'Content-Type: application/json' -d'
{
  "index.search.slowlog.threshold.query.warn": "2s",
  "index.search.slowlog.threshold.query.info": "500ms"
}'

# Magento search query statistics
SELECT query_text, num_results, popularity
FROM search_query
ORDER BY popularity DESC
LIMIT 50;

Common reindex issue: java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: mapper [price_0_1] cannot be changed from type [float] to [double]. Solution — delete and recreate index:

curl -X DELETE "localhost:9200/magento2_product_*"
bin/magento indexer:reindex catalogsearch_fulltext

Setup Timeline

• OpenSearch installation + Magento connection: 1 day
• 3-node cluster setup with replication: 1–2 days
• Custom analyzer tuning + weights for Russian: 2–3 days
• Elasticsearch Suite integration (Smile): 3–5 days