Getting started

ESClient usage

Start or install ElasticSearch

First of all, you have to get ElasticSearch running. If you don't have it installed, please head over to the ElasticSearch site and download it. Once unpacked, you can simply run ElasticSearch in the foreground with:

bin/elasticsearch -f

See.. it's easy to get a test system up and running.

Installing ESClient

Installing ESClient is easy too. You can use pip or easy_install, whichever you prefer.

E.g. with easy_install you'd enter:

sudo easy_install esclient

Alternatively you may also download ESClient from its Github site. After unpacking, you can install ESClient with:

sudo python setup.py install

An interactive Python session

To demonstrate ESClient, we will walk through an interactive Python session and show the ESClient API by example.

First, fire up python:

$ python

At the prompt, enter:

>>> import esclient

You can read the documentation that comes with the esclient code by entering:

>>> help(esclient)

This should be basic stuff for the average Python programmer though. So let us really dive into ESClient now. You first need to create an ESClient object, like so:

>>> es = esclient.ESClient()`

ESClient will by default use localhost as the hostname in combination with the default port 9200. You can supply an alternative location for ElasticSearch like so:

>>> es = esclient.ESClient('http://<hostname>:<port>')

Now that we have an ESClient instance, we can start doing some interesting stuff. First of all let's request the status of the ElasticSearch cluster:

>>>es.status()

{u'indices': {}, u'ok': True, u'_shards': {u'successful': 0, u'failed': 0, u'total': 0}}

Well, great. Now let's create an index. Open the create index API page at http://www.elasticsearch.org/guide/reference/api/admin-indices-create-index.html and read that page. Now we are going to map this knowledge to ESClient.

First of all we need to create a request body that allows us the specify the number of shards and number of replicas we want for our index:

body= {
  "settings" : {
    "index" : {
      "number_of_shards" : 1,
      "number_of_replicas" : 0
    }
      }
}

With this, we can create an index easily:

>>> es.create_index("contacts", body=body)