It provides a simple and powerful REST API for performing a collection of tasks from creating documents, monitoring cluster health, and more.
Python is one of the most popular programming languages, and it tends to complement Elasticsearch very well.
In this guide, we will look at how to go about using the Elasticsearch Python client to interact with the Elasticsearch cluster.
Environment Setup
Before connecting the Elasticsearch Python client, it is good to ensure we have the environment configured.
Step 1: Installing Elasticsearch
The first step is to install and set up the Elastisearch cluster on our system. In this guide, we will use a Ubuntu server.
Start by updating your repositories:
Import the Elasticsearch PGP key.
Install required apt-transport-https package:
Save the repository.
Update and install Elasticsearch
sudo apt install elasticsearch
Enable and start the service:
sudo systemctl start elasticsearch.service
Once the service is up and running, perform a curl to the Elasticsearch endpoint:
If the service is running, you should see an output as shown below:
"name" : "ubuntu2004",
"cluster_name" : "elasticsearch",
"cluster_uuid" : "lUk9qSQtSaSfZXMsyxQdyg",
"version" : {
"number" : "7.15.0",
"build_flavor" : "default",
"build_type" : "deb",
"build_hash" : "79d65f6e357953a5b3cbcc5e2c7c21073d89aa29",
"build_date" : "2021-09-16T03:05:29.143308416Z",
"build_snapshot" : false,
"lucene_version" : "8.9.0",
"minimum_wire_compatibility_version" : "6.8.0",
"minimum_index_compatibility_version" : "6.0.0-beta1"
},
"tagline" : "You Know, for Search"
}
Step 2: Installing Python
The next step is to install Python. On Ubuntu/Debian, open the terminal and enter the command below to confirm the installed python version:
If you have Python 3 installed, you should see an output similar to the one shown below:
If not, install Python 3 using the command:
Step 3: Installing Elasticsearch Client
The final step is installing the Elasticsearch client. We can do this using the pip utility as:
Start by installing pip as:
Finally, install Elasticsearch client as:
Connecting the Elasticsearch Client
Once our environment is set up and configured, we can interact with elastic using the Elasticsearch client.
Start by creating a python file.
vim elastic.py
Ensure the cluster is up and running
Before interacting with the Elasticsearch cluster, ensure the service is up and running using the requests module.
substring = "You Know, for Search".encode()
response = requests.get("http://127.0.0.1:9200")
if substring in response.content:
print("Elasticsearch is up and running!")
else:
print("Something went wrong, ensure the cluster is up!")
Save and run the file as:
Output:
Elasticsearch is up and running!
Connect to the Elasticsearch cluster
To connect to the Elasticsearch cluster, we can implement the following simple script:
from elasticsearch import Elasticsearch
substring = "You Know, for Search".encode()
response = requests.get("http://127.0.0.1:9200")
if substring in response.content:
es = Elasticsearch([{"host": "localhost", "port": 9200}])
Get document with Python
To get a document using the Python client, you can do:
print(res['_source'])
The above example should return details about the queried document.
Indexing a Document
To index a document, use the code:
from elasticsearch import Elasticsearch
es = Elasticsearch([{"host": "localhost", "port": 9200}])
doc = {
"author": "document-author",
"text": "A text document",
"timestamp": datetime.now()
}
res = es.index(index="sample-index", id=2, body=doc)
print(res['result'])
Deleting a document
To delete a document:
Closing
This guide discusses how to set up and use Elasticsearch with Python using the Elasticseach python client.
To learn how to utilize the full functionality of the Elasticsearch library, consider the documentation.
