Chewy Gem with Active Model Serializers in Ruby on Rails 5.2.3

I’ll talk about how to use Chewy gem and Active Model Serializers on Rails app. Chewy is one of ElasticSearch's clients and extends elasticsearch-ruby with various extensions and utilities. It is similar to elasticsearch-rails but I recently had an opportunity to use it in some projects so I’d like to share its usage.

Set up Mysql, ElasticSearch, and Kibana with Docker

To get started with your ElasticSearch app easily, you can use Docker and Docker-compose. I have MySQL 8.0, which is for Ruby on Rails database and ElasticSearch 6.4.2 and Kibana 6.4.2 as below.

Create a docker-compose.yml in your project folder:

version: '3'
services:
  mysql:
    image: mysql:8.0
    volumes:
      - mysqldata:/var/lib/mysql
    command: mysqld --character-set-server=utf8mb4 --collation-server=utf8mb4_0900_as_ci --default-authentication-plugin=mysql_native_password
    environment:
      MYSQL_USER: root
      MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD: root
    ports:
      - 3306:3306
  elasticsearch:
    image: elasticsearch:6.4.2
    volumes:
      - esdata:/usr/share/elasticsearch/data
    environment:
      - "ES_JAVA_OPTS=-Xms1g -Xmx1g"
    ports:
      - "9200:9200"
  kibana:
    image: kibana:6.4.2
    ports:
      - "5601:5601"
volumes:
  mysqldata:
    driver: local
  esdata:
    driver: local

And start with:

docker-compose up

Now you can access ElasticSearch with http://localhost:9200 and Kibana with http://localhost:5601 .

Set up Ruby on Rails on API mode

To keep the system gem clean, I’m going to create a Ruby on Rails project under my workspace.

Create a Gemfile first:

$ mkdir my-chewy-app
$ cd my-chewy-app
$ bundle init 

Open Gemfile and uncomment out gem "rails" :

# frozen_string_literal: true
source "https://rubygems.org"

git_source(:github) {|repo_name| "https://github.com/#{repo_name}" }

gem "rails"

Install bundles:

bundle install --path vendor/bundle