Elasticsearch with Python: introduction

Elasticsearch (ES) is a search server based on Lucene. Currently it has been widely used in different products to provide near real-time search capacity. As a Python user focusing on analytics, having ES integrated with existing Python experience would be mostly helpful & convenient. Recently, I found the following two official ES client quite useful:

1. Elasticsearch-py: a low-level client for ES with most support.

2. Elasticsearch-dsl: a high-level client to write and manipulate ES queries.

Preparation

Step 2: install python analytics packages (iPython Notebook, pip install elasticsearch-py and elasticsearch-dsl), then open the iPython Notebook (or called Jupyter notebook now)

Step 3: set up the connection between the iPython notebook with your local server.

from elasticsearch import Elasticsearch

es = Elasticsearch('localhost:9200')

That's it! Now the "es" variable refers to the elastic search instance you just initiated.

Explore ES Client 

Step 1.: install ES on local machine to start the game. (version: 1.7.5) After download the package, unzip it, and then run "./bin/elasticsearch", a new ES server will be started. By default, the url to access is "localhost:9200"

The mostly used one (beside es itself) is the es.indices, since it includes all operations about the index.

Index Operation

The index operation includes: create, display, and delete. Those operations are shown below: