elasticsearch/docs/python/index.asciidoc

= elasticsearch-py

== Overview

Official low-level client for Elasticsearch. Its goal is to provide common
ground for all Elasticsearch-related code in Python; because of this it tries
to be opinion-free and very extendable. The full documentation is available at
http://elasticsearch-py.rtfd.org/

It can be installed with:

[source,sh]
------------------------------------
pip install elasticsearch
------------------------------------

=== Versioning

There are two branches for development - `master` and `0.4`. Master branch is
used to track all the changes for Elasticsearch 1.0 and beyond whereas 0.4
tracks Elasticsearch 0.90.

Releases with major version 1 (1.X.Y) are to be used with Elasticsearch 1.* and
later, 0.4 releases are meant to work with Elasticsearch 0.90.*.

=== Example use

Simple use-case:

[source,python]
------------------------------------
>>> 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", doc_type="test-type", id=42, body={"any": "data", "timestamp": datetime.now()})
{u'_id': u'42', u'_index': u'my-index', u'_type': u'test-type', u'_version': 1, u'ok': True}

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

[NOTE] 
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.

=== Features

The client's features include:

* translating basic Python data types to and from json (datetimes are not
  decoded for performance reasons)

* 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


=== License

Copyright 2013 Elasticsearch

Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License");
you may not use this file except in compliance with the License.
You may obtain a copy of the License at

    http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0

Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software
distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS,
WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied.
See the License for the specific language governing permissions and
limitations under the License.