On my previous article, I have demonstrated how to search for locations, which is basically points, given a region (in form of polygon) or central point. Now what if we have a bunch of regions and we want to query those regions, to answer the question of “given a point and a circle from that point, what are the regions that surround it?”.
Other than PostGIS, Elasticsearch has the similar functionality to do geo spatial queries. Here I am not going to compare between these two technologies, but to my limited knowledge, elasticsearch could be used for geo spatial search, however it should not be used to store persistent data as opposed to PostgreSQL and PostGIS. I will focus instead to how to index geo spatial documents / data and query it.
Elasticsearch main functionality is not limited to text search with specific tokenizer / analyzer, but it would also be able to serve a fast autocomplete! Here I will briefly explain simple steps to enable the autocomplete search.
Elasticsearch is a great tool to enable search within, not only text data, but also multifield objects. Colima is an alternative to docker, since docker desktop has changed their license to be more commercial focus I have to search for alternative and I found that Colima is one stable alternative for mac. In this guide I will introduce a quick start how to get elasticsearch up in local development environment with docker-compose and colima.