Operating Liferay (on-prem!) with Elasticsearch 8 as a search engine leveraging its REST API compatibility mode through the bundled Elasticsearch 7 connector allowing Liferay deployments to upgrade the Elastic Stack to 8.x (opt-in), while also keeping compatibility with 7.x.

General Upgrade Instructions:

Please refer to the documentation for more details.

1. No action is required for deployments already using and insisting to stay on Elasticsearch 7.
2. Moving to Elasticsearch 8 may require a full reindex depending on the choice of the upgrade path:
   1. Upgrading the current Elasticsearch 7.x cluster to 8.x and connect DXP (Upgrade Elasticsearch | Elasticsearch Guide [8.10] | Elastic , recommended) → No reindex required
   2. Setting-up a new Elasticsearch 8.x cluster, connect DXP → Reindex required!

This is not a new connector, but enhancements to the existing bundled Elasticsearch 7 connector and other Elasticsearch-only features (like Commerce, Workflow Metrics or Search Tuning) leveraging the REST API compatibility mode of Elasticsearch 8 servers.

Liferay Portal 7.4 CE GA78 and Liferay DXP 7.4 Update 78 Tomcat Bundles and Docker Images come with Elasticsearch 7.17.10 for Sidecar.

Support for Object displays pages in the search results, aggregating (via Custom Facet widget), filtering (Custom Filter widget) and sorting (Sort widget) using Object fields that are indexed as Nested Fields in Elasticsearch, similar to Web Content Structure (DDM) fields.

Automatically register a collection provider for each search blueprint. By displaying the blueprint's results in a collection display fragment, you can leverage search to return your assets dynamically, and reap the benefits of the fragments toolbox to lay out the page.

Search the company index for matching content through a single endpoint and build custom search experiences. Supports facets with translated display terms and also custom searching, filtering, aggregation and sorting through Search Blueprints (DXP ONLY)

Liferay Portal 7.4 CE GA88, Liferay DXP 7.4 Update 88 bundled with the latest available version of Elasticsearch 7.x for Sidecar (7.17.12, as of Aug 7, 2023).

With this new front-end client extension users will be able to add an entry to the global import map.

This can be used to share code between decoupled client extensions that are freed from the need to know the deployment URL of the code at build time. For example, this will allow you to share your library or framework of choice among all your front-end client extensions:

For a script to consume the JavaScript module referred to by the import map entry, it needs to be of type=module.

In order to help developers to understand how to use this client extension, a sample has been provided: https://github.com/liferay/liferay-portal/tree/master/workspaces/liferay-sample-workspace/client-extensions/liferay-sample-etc-frontend-2

This new frontend client extension allows users to replace the existing theme spritemap without the need to redeploy a theme. The spritemap should include all icons needed for the scope where it is used.

The Control Panel still uses the admin spritemap.

After registering the client extension, in the page template or page you need to use it, configure it from the design options menu:

To enable this client extension, do it from the Feature Flags management UI: