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Hi HN! Would appreciate any feedback on this project. It's something I think is definitely missing in the ecosystem so far.

What's your experience building a frontend on your Elasticsearch index, tips + something specific you would be looking for in a project like this?

It looks nice, certainly it would be useful to have something quick to throw up in front of an index. What initially came to mind as something I would look for is tangential - with no security for ES, I presumably can't use this approach in anything made generally available over the internet, as I'd have to open ES up to the world? Or is there a way round this?
Good question. From a security perspective you definitely want to be careful exposing your cluster to the outside and perhaps build an API around it as AznHisoka suggests (especially with recent security issues in mind).

However, imo this can be quite cumbersome for simply building a dashboard for internal or client-only use / prototyping. Also, a reverse-proxy limiting requests made to your cluster can also block a lot of malicious requests (e.g.: prevent unintended inserts / updates / deletes).

I probably should add a warning about this to the docs, thanks!

I've built an AngularJS app on top of Elasticsearch but it was specific to my index. I used the Elasticsearch angular adapter that comes with the JS client and wrote a service/factory around it. Definitely interested in something generic to browse an index.

I would really love something that would also let me test queries. There used to be the Sense Chrome plugin but that's been bundled into Marvel and not as available.

It should be quite trivial to build something to browse your index on top of this project. In fact, I suppose the demo/tutorial already comes a long way. If you decide to give it a try don't hesitate to ping me for any help / questions!
Looks really nice. We did something similar building a general ES Backbone framework a while ago. https://github.com/automattic/es-backbone/

We've deployed about 5 or 6 different search pages this way, its really helpful to build custom search pages really quickly.

I rather build an API around my search index rather than call it directly from AngularJS, but that may just be me.
Their Kibana dashboard is just an Angular app that calls ES directly: http://www.elasticsearch.org/overview/kibana/

"NOTE: Kibana 3 talks directly to Elasticsearch from the browser. This means that your browser communicates directly with Elasticsearch, not via an intermediary. You may wish to configure a reverse proxy to restrict access to Elasticsearch."