Overview

This is the official low-level Python client for Elasticsearch. Its goal is to provide common ground for all Elasticsearch-related code in Python. For this reason, the client is designed to be unopinionated and extendable. Full documentation is available on Read the Docs.

Compatibility

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Language clients are forward compatible; meaning that clients support communicating with greater or equal minor versions of Elasticsearch. Elasticsearch language clients are only backwards compatible with default distributions and without guarantees made.

If you have a need to have multiple versions installed at the same time older versions are also released as elasticsearch2 and elasticsearch5.

Example use

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Simple use-case:

>>> from datetime import datetime
>>> from elasticsearch import Elasticsearch

# By default we connect to localhost:9200
>>> es = Elasticsearch()

# Datetimes will be serialized...
>>> es.index(index="my-index-000001", doc_type="test-type", id=42, body={"any": "data", "timestamp": datetime.now()})
{'_id': '42', '_index': 'my-index-000001', '_type': 'test-type', '_version': 1, 'ok': True}

# ...but not deserialized
>>> es.get(index="my-index-000001", doc_type="test-type", id=42)['_source']
{'any': 'data', 'timestamp': '2013-05-12T19:45:31.804229'}

All the API calls map the raw REST API as closely as possible, including the distinction between required and optional arguments to the calls. This means that the code makes distinction between positional and keyword arguments; we, however, recommend that people use keyword arguments for all calls for consistency and safety.

For an elaborate example of how to ingest data into Elastic Cloud, refer to this page.

Features

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The client’s features include:

Translating basic Python data types to and from JSON
Configurable automatic discovery of cluster nodes
Persistent connections
Load balancing (with pluggable selection strategy) across all available nodes
Failed connection penalization (time based - failed connections won’t be retried until a timeout is reached)
Thread safety
Pluggable architecture

The client also contains a convenient set of helpers for some of the more engaging tasks like bulk indexing and reindexing.

Elasticsearch DSL

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For a more high level client library with more limited scope, have a look at elasticsearch-dsl - a more Pythonic library sitting on top of elasticsearch-py.

It provides a more convenient and idiomatic way to write and manipulate queries. It stays close to the Elasticsearch JSON DSL, mirroring its terminology and structure while exposing the whole range of the DSL from Python either directly using defined classes or a queryset-like expressions.

It also provides an optional persistence layer for working with documents as Python objects in an ORM-like fashion: defining mappings, retrieving and saving documents, wrapping the document data in user-defined classes.

Installation »