Building an Application with JHipster, PostgreSQL, and Elasticsearch in 10 Minutes

Introduction

In today’s fast-paced development landscape, creating robust and scalable applications quickly is essential. Leveraging jHipster, PostgreSQL, and Elasticsearch can streamline this process. This article walks you through the steps of building a demo project, showcasing the integration of these powerful tools in just 10 minutes.

Why jHipster?

jHipster accelerates application development by providing a complete stack, including front-end and back-end technologies. It generates high-quality code, follows best practices, and offers extensive tooling, making it a go-to solution for developers seeking efficiency and reliability.

Prerequisites

PostgreSQL

In this article, we will be using PostgreSQL as our database. You can maintain your database in any database management system. For a convenient deployment option, consider cloud-based solutions like Rapidapp, which offers managed PostgreSQL databases, simplifying setup and maintenance.

tip

Create a free database in Rapidapp in seconds here

Elasticsearch

We will be using Elasticsearch for the search engine. Elasticsearch is an open-source, distributed, and scalable search engine which you can deploy on-premises or in the cloud. You can use Elastic Cloud if you don't want to maintain your own instance.

jHipster CLi

To get started with jHipster, you'll need to install jHipster CLi.

Getting Started

You can simply run jhipster command in your terminal and follow the prompts to get started as shown below. Do not forget to provide your own namings to fields like application name, package name etc.

? What is the base name of your application? demo
? Which *type* of application would you like to create? Monolithic application (recommended for simple projects)
? What is your default Java package name? com.huseyinbabal.demo
? Would you like to use Maven or Gradle for building the backend? Maven
? Do you want to make it reactive with Spring WebFlux? No
? Which *type* of authentication would you like to use? JWT authentication (stateless, with a token)
? Besides JUnit, which testing frameworks would you like to use?
? Which *type* of database would you like to use? SQL (H2, PostgreSQL, MySQL, MariaDB, Oracle, MSSQL)
? Which *production* database would you like to use? PostgreSQL
? Which *development* database would you like to use? PostgreSQL
? Which cache do you want to use? (Spring cache abstraction) Ehcache (local cache, for a single node)
? Do you want to use Hibernate 2nd level cache? Yes
? Which other technologies would you like to use? Elasticsearch as search engine
? Which *framework* would you like to use for the client? React
? Besides Jest/Vitest, which testing frameworks would you like to use?
? Do you want to generate the admin UI? Yes
? Would you like to use a Bootswatch theme (https://bootswatch.com/)? Default JHipster
? Would you like to enable internationalization support? No
? Please choose the native language of the application English

This will generate a full-stack application where PostgreSQL and Elasticsearch is configured and enabled during application application startup. Now that you have the basic setup, you can start configuring the datasource.

PostgreSQL Configuration

Once you open project folder in your favourite IDE, you can see the generated application*.yaml files under src/main/resources/config folder. Since we are doing local development for now, you can open application-dev.yaml and configure datasource as follows.

application-dev.yaml

spring:
  datasource:
    url: jdbc:postgresql://<host>:<port>/<db_name>?sslmode=require&application_name=rapidapp_jhipster # You can find details on Rapidapp db details page.
    username: <username>
    password: <password>

Line 3: You can find the DB connection details on Rapidapp db details page.

Elasticsearch Configuration

We will configure Elasticsearch as a search engine in our application. Once you create your own Elasticsearch instance, or create one in Elastic Cloud, note your Elasticsearch credentials to use them in the following configuration section.

application-dev.yaml

spring:
  elasticsearch:
    uris: https://elastic:<password>@<host>:<port>

Running the Application

Now that you have configured your database and search engine, you can start the application with the following command:

./mvn

Above command will do the followings;

• Build the frontend and backend projects
• Start the backend project while running liquibase asynchronously. Liquibase will prepare the database schema by using your entities.
• Start the frontend project. If everything goes well, you will see an output as follows;

2024-06-19T17:01:11.056+03:00  INFO 65684 --- [  restartedMain] com.huseyinbabal.jdemo.JDemoApp          :
----------------------------------------------------------
	Application 'jDemo' is running! Access URLs:
	Local: 		http://localhost:8080/
	External: 	http://192.168.1.150:8080/
	Profile(s): 	[dev, api-docs]
----------------------------------------------------------

You can simply navigate to http://localhost:8080/ to access the application. It will show you the default credentials for users with admin and user rights, you can login with admin:admin credentials to see how admin UI looks like. You can see the critical components below;

• Entities: Entities used in this application. We will see this soon to create our own entities to use in the application.
• Administration > Metrics: You can see several metrics like JVM, Cache, HTTP statistics.
• Administration > Health: You can see the health information of the application like db, disk health.
• Administration > Logs: You can see the log configuration of the application where you can set log level in root or package level. Feel free to walk through the menus in Admin UI menu to get familiar with them, meanwhile, let's see how we can add our own entities to application.

Adding Entities

We will add our own entities to the application. Let's create a new entity called Product and add it to the application with the following command

jhipster entity product

It will prompt you to add fields for this entity. You can use following fields;

• title: String
• description: String
• price: Float Once it is done, it will create necessary entity in codebase and related controller for the CRUD operations. src/main/java/<package>/domain/Product.java contains the generated entity class and src/main/java/<package>/repository/ProductRepository.java contains the generated repository class. In order to access resource information which is the presentation layer, you can take a look at src/main/java/<package>/web/rest/ProductResource.java. Let's take a look at how it creates a product as shown below.

ProductResource.java

@PostMapping("")
public ResponseEntity<Product> createProduct(@RequestBody Product product) throws URISyntaxException {
    log.debug("REST request to save Product : {}", product);
    if (product.getId() != null) {
        throw new BadRequestAlertException("A new product cannot already have an ID", ENTITY_NAME, "idexists");
    }
    product = productRepository.save(product);
    productSearchRepository.index(product);
    return ResponseEntity.created(new URI("/api/products/" + product.getId()))
        .headers(HeaderUtil.createEntityCreationAlert(applicationName, false, ENTITY_NAME, product.getId().toString()))
        .body(product);
}

Line 8: productSearchRepository.index(product) is used to index the product in Elasticsearch. You see how easy it is to store product data in elasticsearch. We haven't written any code for that, but since we have added elasticsearch config, jHipster becomes an elasticsearch-aware system where it also generates required functions for you.

In same way, let's see how it searches product as shown below.

ProductResource.java

@GetMapping("/_search")
public ResponseEntity<List<Product>> searchProducts(
    @RequestParam("query") String query,
    @org.springdoc.core.annotations.ParameterObject Pageable pageable
) {
    log.debug("REST request to search for a page of Products for query {}", query);
    try {
        Page<Product> page = productSearchRepository.search(query, pageable);
        HttpHeaders headers = PaginationUtil.generatePaginationHttpHeaders(ServletUriComponentsBuilder.fromCurrentRequest(), page);
        return ResponseEntity.ok().headers(headers).body(page.getContent());
    } catch (RuntimeException e) {
        throw ElasticsearchExceptionMapper.mapException(e);
    }
}

Line 8: productSearchRepository.search(query, pageable) is used to search product in elasticsearch.

Product Entity in Admin UI

As you can see, we have created a product entity in Admin UI. You can see it in Entities menu. Once you navigate to Product module, you can create new Product, list products, view details of a product or delete any of them. Also, there is a search bar where you can search products with the help of Elasticsearch on the backend side.

Conclusion

We have seen that you can leverage jHipster's rapid development capabilities along with the robust data management of PostgreSQL and powerful search functionality of Elasticsearch. jHipster simplifies and accelerates application creation with its comprehensive toolset and best practices, while PostgreSQL ensures reliable and efficient data handling. Elasticsearch adds advanced search capabilities, making your application both scalable and responsive. Utilizing Rapidapp's PostgreSQL as a service further streamlines database management, allowing you to focus on developing high-quality applications quickly and effectively.

tip

You can find the complete source code for this project on GitHub.