[Fix] Heroku / SearchBox addon - indexing error "The client is unable to verify that the server is Elasticsearch"

31 Jan 13:09

2 min. read

Post cover: [Fix] Heroku / SearchBox addon - indexing error "The client is unable to verify that the server is Elasticsearch"

This content has been automatically translated from Ukrainian.

When setting up the SearchBox search add-on on Heroku, an error occurred while starting the indexing from the console.

Loading production environment (Rails 7.0.4.3)
irb(main):001:0> Document.__elasticsearch__.create_index! force: true
The client is unable to verify that the server is Elasticsearch. Some functionality may not be compatible if the server is running an unsupported product.
/app/vendor/bundle/ruby/3.2.0/gems/elasticsearch-8.17.1/lib/elasticsearch.rb:103:in `verify_elasticsearch’:ssupport this unknown product. (Elasticsearch::UnsupportedProductError)

The following libraries were installed in the latest versions (8):

gem 'elasticsearch-model'
gem 'elasticsearch-rails'

The official documentation states:

Ensure you are using client version of 7 if you get error The client noticed that the server is not a supported distribution of Elasticsearch while connecting to your endpoint.

But it won't be possible to lock the versions of elasticsearch-model and elasticsearch-rails to 7, as they depend on elasticsearch 8 or 7.17 (which also does not suit us)

irb(main):001:0> Topic.__elasticsearch__.create_index! force: true
/app/vendor/bundle/ruby/3.2.0/gems/elasticsearch-7.17.11/lib/elasticsearch.rb:86:in `verify_with_version_or_header': The client noticed that the server is not a supported distribution of Elasticsearch. (Elasticsearch::UnsupportedProductError)

So the best option is to add elasticsearch to the Gemfile and lock it to the required version 7.

gem 'elasticsearch', '7.0.0'
gem 'elasticsearch-model', '7.0.0'
gem 'elasticsearch-rails', '7.0.0'

But it’s better to consider alternative add-ons on Heroku, like Bonsai. They use the latest versions of libraries with the necessary patches. Security above all.