Testing Rails Elasticsearch implementation, waiting for refresh_index to finish before searching

Question

I am having a great deal of issues with "race conditions" in my specs for Elasticsearch testing. Sometimes my tests pass, sometimes they don't, sometimes they find X number of results and sometimes they find a different number of results. This all stems from my searches being executed before ES is done indexing after new records to the DB.

I create the record, then run: Model.__elasticsearch__.refresh_index! to refresh the index and then execute my search but I am getting inconsistent search results.

I can hack my way around this by adding a sleep 3 after the .refresh_index! but this all seems like a terrible hack. Is there any other solution to this problem?

I am using the elasticsearch gem with rspec.

gem 'elasticsearch', '< 7.14'
gem 'elasticsearch-model', '7.1.1'
gem 'elasticsearch-rails', '7.1.1'

Answer 1

If I understood your workflow and use case exactly, you can leverage the refresh query parameter of the index API to make the document instantly searchable (docs)