OpenSearch

Part of the Sidecar Services catalog.

What it does

OpenSearch is the open-source fork of Elasticsearch. As a sidecar it backs faceted search and full-text queries on a project locally, standing in for a hosted OpenSearch cluster the production site queries. Add it when a project targets OpenSearch (for example sites on AWS OpenSearch Service) and you want the search backend running on your machine.

How it works

The preset pins opensearchproject/opensearch:2.13.0 and listens on container port 9200. It runs as a single node with the security plugin disabled (discovery.type=single-node, DISABLE_SECURITY_PLUGIN=true, DISABLE_INSTALL_DEMO_CONFIG=true) and a fixed 512m heap, so there is no TLS or demo-user setup to work around locally. The index persists in a named volume mounted at /usr/share/opensearch/data.

OpenSearch gets a browser UI: the host port is auto-allocated from the 7000 to 7999 range and de-conflicted across all projects.

wdg my-site service add opensearch
wdg my-site service list

Read the browser URL from the service list output.

How it integrates with the local WordPress container

Adding the sidecar injects these env vars into the WordPress container:

Variable	Value
OPENSEARCH_HOST	wdg-my-site-opensearch (the @HOST token resolved at add-time)
OPENSEARCH_PORT	9200

WordPress reaches OpenSearch over wdg-network at wdg-my-site-opensearch:9200, never the host port. The host port exists only for your browser.

These env vars are connectivity hints. The project supplies the code that consumes them. A client reads the values in PHP and connects without credentials, since the security plugin is disabled for local use:

$host = getenv( 'OPENSEARCH_HOST' ); // wdg-my-site-opensearch
$port = getenv( 'OPENSEARCH_PORT' ); // 9200
$endpoint = "http://{$host}:{$port}";

Adding the sidecar wires reachability only. The project installs and configures the search integration.

Add and remove

wdg my-site service add opensearch
wdg my-site service remove opensearch          # keeps the data volume
wdg my-site service remove opensearch --purge  # also deletes the data volume