Search & Discovery: Week 1

by Harsh Chandwani

week
gsoc
gsoc2026
SearchDiscovery
week#1
Phase-1

Week Summary

Week 1 kicked off the coding period, and the focus was standing up OpenSearch alongside the existing Elasticsearch in the CDLI dev environment. I added OpenSearch 2.19.5 as a second search engine next to Elasticsearch 7.17.28 in docker-compose.dev.yml, giving it its own ports (9202/9302), a bind-mounted data directory, and basic auth with SSL disabled for local development. The service URL is registered in app.php and config.dev.json, disabled by default so developers opt in. To confirm both engines behave identically, I ran a 7-test API compatibility check (match_all, match, term, bool, aggregation, and count): all returned identical results, including bit-identical BM25 scores. Mentor review led to enabling authentication on OpenSearch, which had initially gone up with security disabled, and the password was chosen without an @ character to avoid URL-parsing issues in PHP. The MR (!1226) is up against the search-discovery branch with all 9 acceptance criteria met.

Daily Work Update

# Day Date A short description of the work done
1 Monday 2026/05/25 Confirmed the branching strategy with mentors: a dedicated phoenix/gsoc/search-discovery branch that every MR targets throughout the project
2 Tuesday 2026/05/26 Researched and triaged the existing search issues to tackle during the coding period
3 Wednesday 2026/05/27 Created issue #2622, grouping and categorizing all existing search issues by priority and phase
4 Thursday 2026/05/28 Started implementing the OpenSearch service alongside Elasticsearch
5 Friday 2026/05/29 Raised the OpenSearch implementation MR (!1226)
6 Saturday 2026/05/30 Addressed Vedant’s review feedback on MR !1226 (enabled basic auth, added reference links)
7 Sunday 2026/05/31 Started planning the ArtifactDocumentBuilder approach for Week 2