dejaVu - a modern Elasticsearch databrowser

dejaVu fits the unmet need of being a hackable data browser for Elasticsearch. Existing browsers were either built with a legacy UI and had a lacking user experience or used server side rendering (I am looking at you, Kibana).

So we decided to build our own, with a goal of making it 100% client side and using modern UI elements (no page reloads, infinite scrolling, creating filter views). It's available as a github hosted page, chrome extension and as an Elasticsearch plugin.

Elasticsearch plugin - Installation

bin/plugin install appbaseio/dejaVu

Note: To make sure you enable CORS settings for your ElasticSearch instance, add the following lines in the ES configuration file.

 http.port: 9200
 http.cors.allow-origin: "http://127.0.0.1:9200"
 http.cors.enabled: true
 http.cors.allow-headers : X-Requested-With,X-Auth-Token,Content-Type, Content-Length, Authorization
 http.cors.allow-credentials: true

After installing the plugin, start elasticsearch service

elasticsearch

and visit the following URL to access it.

http://127.0.0.1:9200/_plugin/dejaVu

Note: If you use Elasticsearch from a different port, the URL to access and the http.cors.allow-origin value in the configuration file would change accordingly.

Developing

dev branch is the bleeding edge version of dejavu, all new changes go here.

master branch is more suitable for installing dejavu locally. The Elasticsearch site plugin for dejavu uses master branch.

chrome-extension branch is where we make chrome app related changes. The main difference in the chrome app is the lack of support for the localStorage API (It has it's own chrome.storage API, which is asynchronous in nature).

Local Installation

git clone https://github.com/appbaseio/dejaVu
git checkout master
npm install
bower install
gulp watch (runs dejavu on http://localhost:1358)

Contributing

The source code is under the _site/src directory. You can make pull requests against the dev branch.

Features

Filter Views

Sort through the data, find things visually, hide irrelevant data and make sense of all the numbers and dates. Filters work by identifying data mappings from the Elasticsearch index. If dejavu sees a string field, it will provide filters for search, has and has not and is also mindful if the data is analyzed. Similarly a numeric field allows filtering on ranges and a date field allows filtering data by dates.

dejavu also supports local filters like column sorting and showing a subset of columns.

To-do: dejavu doesn't support filtering on advanced data types (like geopoint, parent-child); but it's possible to add those at some point.

Modern UI elements

It's not uncommon to have thousands of records in a type. dejavu supports an infinite scroll based UI, pagination is so old school.

dejavu also supports browsing data from multiple types and bulk deletions. It also let's you add new records and update existing records.

Realtime data updates

dejavu uses a websockets based API and subscribes for data changes for the current filtered view. For this to work, the Elasticsearch server needs to support a websockets based publish API. Currently, you can take advantage of this feature by hosting your data with appbase.io.

Comparison with other data browsers

Features	dejaVu	ES-head	ES-kopf	ES-browser	Kibana
Installation	Chrome app, Elasticsearch plugin, static page	Elasticsearch plugin, static page	Elasticsearch plugin, static page	Elasticsearch plugin (doesn't work with v2.0 and above)	Elasticsearch plugin
Modern UI	Built with React v0.14.0, uses a live-reload interface.	Built with jQuery v1.6.1, slightly stodgy	Built with Angular 1.x	Built with ExtJs, but a bit stodgy	Built with Node.JS, Hapi, Jade
Browser features	CRUD with support for data filters.	Read data with support for full-text search.	No data view	Data view support for a single type	Read view with support for visualizations / charting
Open Source	MIT license	Apache v2.0	MIT license	Apache v2.0	Apache v2.0

Roadmap

Here's a rough roadmap of things to come in the v1.0 release.

Create a test coverage suite
Battle-testing with different datasets
Feature support for advanced filtering
Offline detection and reconnection for realtime updates
Performance improvements while scrolling

indynz/dejaVu