elasticsearch-bblfsh

"Code as data" can be a powerful idea, but I don't think there are many concrete examples. To explore this concept, I used bblfshd to analyze the Elasticsearch code base to get a full list of all the configurable settings in Elasticsearch.

Take a look at the generated settings here.

The problem space

Elasticsearch has a lot of configurable settings and they aren't fully listed anywhere. Some are dynamic, some are not. I wanted to explore how to get all of the settings and their properties to see what I could do.

The main tech

This analysis is powered by bblfshd (pronounced babelfish). It's takes code and produces a "universal abstract syntax tree" (uast) of the code and supports a number of languages. Elasticsearch is written in Java which is one of the provided languages.

Getting up and running

Prereqs

Is written in go, so you need to have go installed
Assumes bblfshd is running on localhost:9432, see their docs on getting started
Need to have a checkout of the Elasticsearch codebase somewhere on disk

Building and running

cd into cmd/elasticsearch-bblfsh
go build will make the elasticsearch-bblfsh executable
./elasticsearch-bblfsh will create elasticsearchSettings.json with all of the settings found

Caveats

This was a fun experiment for me. I'm very new at writing go code and it's probably all wrong. Use at your own risk.