Elasticsearch DSL

Elasticsearch DSL is a high-level library whose aim is to help with writing and running queries against Elasticsearch. It is built on top of the official low-level client (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. It exposes the whole range of the DSL from Python either directly using defined classes or a queryset-like expressions.

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

To use the other Elasticsearch APIs (eg. cluster health) just use the underlying client.

Compatibility

The library is compatible with all Elasticsearch versions since 1.x but you have to use a matching major version:

For Elasticsearch 5.0 and later, use the major version 5 (5.x.y) of the library.

For Elasticsearch 2.0 and later, use the major version 2 (2.x.y) of the library.

For Elasticsearch 1.0 and later, use the major version 0 (0.x.y) of the library.

The recommended way to set your requirements in your setup.py or requirements.txt is:

# Elasticsearch 5.x
elasticsearch-dsl>=5.0.0,<6.0.0

# Elasticsearch 2.x
elasticsearch-dsl>=2.0.0,<3.0.0

# Elasticsearch 1.x
elasticsearch-dsl<2.0.0

The development is happening on master and 1.x branches, respectively.

Search Example

Let’s have a typical search request written directly as a dict:

from elasticsearch import Elasticsearch
client = Elasticsearch()

response = client.search(
    index="my-index",
    body={
      "query": {
        "filtered": {
          "query": {
            "bool": {
              "must": [{"match": {"title": "python"}}],
              "must_not": [{"match": {"description": "beta"}}]
            }
          },
          "filter": {"term": {"category": "search"}}
        }
      },
      "aggs" : {
        "per_tag": {
          "terms": {"field": "tags"},
          "aggs": {
            "max_lines": {"max": {"field": "lines"}}
          }
        }
      }
    }
)

for hit in response['hits']['hits']:
    print(hit['_score'], hit['_source']['title'])

for tag in response['aggregations']['per_tag']['buckets']:
    print(tag['key'], tag['max_lines']['value'])

The problem with this approach is that it is very verbose, prone to syntax mistakes like incorrect nesting, hard to modify (eg. adding another filter) and definitely not fun to write.

Let’s rewrite the example using the Python DSL:

from elasticsearch import Elasticsearch
from elasticsearch_dsl import Search

client = Elasticsearch()

s = Search(using=client, index="my-index") \
    .filter("term", category="search") \
    .query("match", title="python")   \
    .exclude("match", description="beta")

s.aggs.bucket('per_tag', 'terms', field='tags') \
    .metric('max_lines', 'max', field='lines')

response = s.execute()

for hit in response:
    print(hit.meta.score, hit.title)

for tag in response.aggregations.per_tag.buckets:
    print(tag.key, tag.max_lines.value)

As you see, the library took care of:

  • creating appropriate Query objects by name (eq. “match”)
  • composing queries into a compound bool query
  • creating a filtered query since .filter() was used
  • providing a convenient access to response data
  • no curly or square brackets everywhere

Persistence Example

Let’s have a simple Python class representing an article in a blogging system:

from datetime import datetime
from elasticsearch_dsl import DocType, Date, Integer, Keyword, Text
from elasticsearch_dsl.connections import connections

# Define a default Elasticsearch client
connections.create_connection(hosts=['localhost'])

class Article(DocType):
    title = Text(analyzer='snowball', fields={'raw': Keyword()})
    body = Text(analyzer='snowball')
    tags = Keyword()
    published_from = Date()
    lines = Integer()

    class Meta:
        index = 'blog'

    def save(self, ** kwargs):
        self.lines = len(self.body.split())
        return super(Article, self).save(** kwargs)

    def is_published(self):
        return datetime.now() >= self.published_from

# create the mappings in elasticsearch
Article.init()

# create and save and article
article = Article(meta={'id': 42}, title='Hello world!', tags=['test'])
article.body = ''' looong text '''
article.published_from = datetime.now()
article.save()

article = Article.get(id=42)
print(article.is_published())

# Display cluster health
print(connections.get_connection().cluster.health())

In this example you can see:

  • providing a Default connection
  • defining fields with mapping configuration
  • setting index name
  • defining custom methods
  • overriding the built-in .save() method to hook into the persistence life cycle
  • retrieving and saving the object into Elasticsearch
  • accessing the underlying client for other APIs

You can see more in the Persistence chapter.

Migration from elasticsearch-py

You don’t have to port your entire application to get the benefits of the Python DSL, you can start gradually by creating a Search object from your existing dict, modifying it using the API and serializing it back to a dict:

body = {...} # insert complicated query here

# Convert to Search object
s = Search.from_dict(body)

# Add some filters, aggregations, queries, ...
s.filter("term", tags="python")

# Convert back to dict to plug back into existing code
body = s.to_dict()

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

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.

Contents

Configuration

There are several ways how to configure connections for the library. Easiest option, and most useful, is to just define one default connection that will be used every time an API call is made without explicitly passing in other connection.

When using elasticsearch_dsl it is highly recommended to use the attached serializer (elasticsearch_dsl.serializer.serializer) that will make sure your objects are correctly serialized into json every time. The create_connection method that is described here (and that configure method uses under the hood) will do that automatically for you, unless you explicitly specify your own serializer. The serializer we use will also allow you to serialize your own objects - just define a to_dict() method on your objects and it will automatically be called when serializing to json.

Note

Unless you want to access multiple clusters from your application it is highly recommended that you use the create_connection method and all operations will use that connection automatically.

Manual

If you don’t wish to supply global configuration you can always pass in your own connection (instance of elasticsearch.Elasticsearch) as parameter using wherever it is accepted:

s = Search(using=Elasticsearch('localhost'))

You can even use this approach to override any connection the object might be already associated with:

s = s.using(Elasticsearch('otherhost:9200'))

Default connection

To define a default connection that will be used globally, use the connections module and the create_connection method:

from elasticsearch_dsl import connections

connections.create_connection(hosts=['localhost'], timeout=20)

Any keyword arguments (hosts and timeout in our example) will be passed to the Elasticsearch class from elasticsearch-py. To see all the possible configuration options see the documentation.

Multiple clusters

You can define multiple connections to multiple clusters, either at the same time using the configure method:

from elasticsearch_dsl import connections

connections.configure(
    default={'hosts': 'localhost'},
    dev={
        'hosts': ['esdev1.example.com:9200'],
        'sniff_on_start': True
    }
)

Such connections will be constructed lazily when requested for the first time.

Or just add them one by one:

# if you have configuration to be passed to Elasticsearch.__init__
connections.create_connection('qa', hosts=['esqa1.example.com'], sniff_on_start=True)

# if you already have an Elasticsearch instance ready
connections.add_connection('qa', my_client)
Using aliases

When using multiple connections you can just refer to them using the string alias you registered them under:

s = Search(using='qa')

KeyError will be raised if there is no connection registered under that alias.

Search DSL

The Search object

The Search object represents the entire search request:

  • queries
  • filters
  • aggregations
  • sort
  • pagination
  • additional parameters
  • associated client

The API is designed to be chainable. With the exception of the aggregations functionality this means that the Search object is immutable - all changes to the object will result in a copy being created which contains the changes. This means you can safely pass the Search object to foreign code without fear of it modifying your objects.

You can pass an instance of the low-level elasticsearch client when instantiating the Search object:

from elasticsearch import Elasticsearch
from elasticsearch_dsl import Search

client = Elasticsearch()

s = Search(using=client)

You can also define the client at a later time (for more options see the ~:ref:connections chapter):

s = s.using(client)

Note

All methods return a copy of the object, making it safe to pass to outside code.

The API is chainable, allowing you to combine multiple method calls in one statement:

s = Search().using(client).query("match", title="python")

To send the request to Elasticsearch:

response = s.execute()

If you just want to iterate over the hits returned by your search you can iterate over the Search object:

for hit in s:
    print(hit.title)

Search results will be cached. Subsequent calls to execute or trying to iterate over an already executed Search object will not trigger additional requests being sent to Elasticsearch. To force a request specify ignore_cache=True when calling execute.

For debugging purposes you can serialize the Search object to a dict explicitly:

print(s.to_dict())
Delete By Query

You can delete the documents matching a search by calling delete on the Search object instead of execute like this:

s = Search().query("match", title="python")
response = s.delete()
Queries

The library provides classes for all Elasticsearch query types. Pass all the parameters as keyword arguments. The classes accept any keyword arguments, the dsl then takes all arguments passed to the constructor and serializes them as top-level keys in the resulting dictionary (and thus the resulting json being sent to elasticsearch). This means that there is a clear one-to-one mapping between the raw query and its equivalent in the DSL:

from elasticsearch_dsl.query import MultiMatch, Match

# {"multi_match": {"query": "python django", "fields": ["title", "body"]}}
MultiMatch(query='python django', fields=['title', 'body'])

# {"match": {"title": {"query": "web framework", "type": "phrase"}}}
Match(title={"query": "web framework", "type": "phrase"})

Note

In some cases this approach is not possible due to python’s restriction on identifiers - for example if your field is called @timestamp. In that case you have to fall back to unpacking a dictionary: Range(** {'@timestamp': {'lt': 'now'}})

You can use the Q shortcut to construct the instance using a name with parameters or the raw dict:

Q("multi_match", query='python django', fields=['title', 'body'])
Q({"multi_match": {"query": "python django", "fields": ["title", "body"]}})

To add the query to the Search object, use the .query() method:

q = Q("multi_match", query='python django', fields=['title', 'body'])
s = s.query(q)

The method also accepts all the parameters as the Q shortcut:

s = s.query("multi_match", query='python django', fields=['title', 'body'])

If you already have a query object, or a dict representing one, you can just override the query used in the Search object:

s.query = Q('bool', must=[Q('match', title='python'), Q('match', body='best')])
Query combination

Query objects can be combined using logical operators:

Q("match", title='python') | Q("match", title='django')
# {"bool": {"should": [...]}}

Q("match", title='python') & Q("match", title='django')
# {"bool": {"must": [...]}}

~Q("match", title="python")
# {"bool": {"must_not": [...]}}

When you call the .query() method multiple times, the & operator will be used internally:

s = s.query().query()
print(s.to_dict())
# {"query": {"bool": {...}}}

If you want to have precise control over the query form, use the Q shortcut to directly construct the combined query:

q = Q('bool',
    must=[Q('match', title='python')],
    should=[Q(...), Q(...)],
    minimum_should_match=1
)
s = Search().query(q)
Filters

If you want to add a query in a filter context you can use the filter() method to make things easier:

s = Search()
s = s.filter('terms', tags=['search', 'python'])

Behind the scenes this will produce a Bool query and place the specified terms query into its filter branch, making it equivalent to:

s = Search()
s = s.query('bool', filter=[Q('terms', tags=['search', 'python'])])

If you want to use the post_filter element for faceted navigation, use the .post_filter() method.

You can also exclude() items from your query like this:

s = Search()
s = s.exclude('terms', tags=['search', 'python'])

which is shorthand for: s = s.query('bool', filter=[~Q('terms', tags=['search', 'python'])])

Aggregations

To define an aggregation, you can use the A shortcut:

A('terms', field='tags')
# {"terms": {"field": "tags"}}

To nest aggregations, you can use the .bucket(), .metric() and .pipeline() methods:

a = A('terms', field='category')
# {'terms': {'field': 'category'}}

a.metric('clicks_per_category', 'sum', field='clicks')\
    .bucket('tags_per_category', 'terms', field='tags')
# {
#   'terms': {'field': 'category'},
#   'aggs': {
#     'clicks_per_category': {'sum': {'field': 'clicks'}},
#     'tags_per_category': {'terms': {'field': 'tags'}}
#   }
# }

To add aggregations to the Search object, use the .aggs property, which acts as a top-level aggregation:

s = Search()
a = A('terms', field='category')
s.aggs.bucket('category_terms', a)
# {
#   'aggs': {
#     'category_terms': {
#       'terms': {
#         'field': 'category'
#       }
#     }
#   }
# }

or

s = Search()
s.aggs.bucket('articles_per_day', 'date_histogram', field='publish_date', interval='day')\
    .metric('clicks_per_day', 'sum', field='clicks')\
    .pipeline('moving_click_average', 'moving_avg', buckets_path='clicks_per_day')\
    .bucket('tags_per_day', 'terms', field='tags')

s.to_dict()
# {
#   "aggs": {
#     "articles_per_day": {
#       "date_histogram": { "interval": "day", "field": "publish_date" },
#       "aggs": {
#         "clicks_per_day": { "sum": { "field": "clicks" } },
#         "moving_click_average": { "moving_avg": { "buckets_path": "clicks_per_day" } },
#         "tags_per_day": { "terms": { "field": "tags" } }
#       }
#     }
#   }
# }

You can access an existing bucket by its name:

s = Search()

s.aggs.bucket('per_category', 'terms', field='category')
s.aggs['per_category'].metric('clicks_per_category', 'sum', field='clicks')
s.aggs['per_category'].bucket('tags_per_category', 'terms', field='tags')

Note

When chaining multiple aggregations, there is a difference between what .bucket() and .metric() methods return - .bucket() returns the newly defined bucket while .metric() returns its parent bucket to allow further chaining.

As opposed to other methods on the Search objects, defining aggregations is done in-place (does not return a copy).

Sorting

To specify sorting order, use the .sort() method:

s = Search().sort(
    'category',
    '-title',
    {"lines" : {"order" : "asc", "mode" : "avg"}}
)

It accepts positional arguments which can be either strings or dictionaries. String value is a field name, optionally prefixed by the - sign to specify a descending order.

To reset the sorting, just call the method with no arguments:

s = s.sort()
Highlighting

To set common attributes for highlighting use the highlight_options method:

s = s.highlight_options(order='score')

Enabling highlighting for individual fields is done using the highlight method:

s = s.highlight('title')
# or, including parameters:
s = s.highlight('title', fragment_size=50)

The fragments in the response will then be available on reach Result object as .meta.highlight.FIELD which will contain the list of fragments:

response = s.execute()
for hit in response:
    for fragment in hit.meta.highlight.title:
        print(fragment)
Suggestions

To specify a suggest request on your Search object use the suggest method:

s = s.suggest('my_suggestion', 'pyhton', term={'field': 'title'})

The first argument is the name of the suggestions (name under which it will be returned), second is the actual text you wish the suggester to work on and the keyword arguments will be added to the suggest’s json as-is which means that it should be one of term, phrase or completion to indicate which type of suggester should be used.

If you only wish to run the suggestion part of the search (via the _suggest endpoint) you can do so via execute_suggest:

s = s.suggest('my_suggestion', 'pyhton', term={'field': 'title'})
suggestions = s.execute_suggest()

print(suggestions.my_suggestion)
Extra properties and parameters

To set extra properties of the search request, use the .extra() method. This can be used to define keys in the body that cannot be defined via a specific API method like explain or search_after:

s = s.extra(explain=True)

To set query parameters, use the .params() method:

s = s.params(search_type="count")

If you need to limit the fields being returned by elasticsearch, use the source() method:

# only return the selected fields
s = s.source(['title', 'body'])
# don't return any fields, just the metadata
s = s.source(False)
# explicitly include/exclude fields
s = s.source(include=["title"], exclude=["user.*"])
# reset the field selection
s = s.source(None)
Serialization and Deserialization

The search object can be serialized into a dictionary by using the .to_dict() method.

You can also create a Search object from a dict using the from_dict class method. This will create a new Search object and populate it using the data from the dict:

s = Search.from_dict({"query": {"match": {"title": "python"}}})

If you wish to modify an existing Search object, overriding it’s properties, instead use the update_from_dict method that alters an instance in-place:

s = Search(index='i')
s.update_from_dict({"query": {"match": {"title": "python"}}, "size": 42})

Response

You can execute your search by calling the .execute() method that will return a Response object. The Response object allows you access to any key from the response dictionary via attribute access. It also provides some convenient helpers:

response = s.execute()

print(response.success())
# True

print(response.took)
# 12

print(response.hits.total)

print(response.suggest.my_suggestions)

If you want to inspect the contents of the response objects, just use its to_dict method to get access to the raw data for pretty printing.

Hits

To access to the hits returned by the search, access the hits property or just iterate over the Response object:

response = s.execute()
print('Total %d hits found.' % response.hits.total)
for h in response:
    print(h.title, h.body)
Result

The individual hits is wrapped in a convenience class that allows attribute access to the keys in the returned dictionary. All the metadata for the results are accessible via meta (without the leading _):

response = s.execute()
h = response.hits[0]
print('/%s/%s/%s returned with score %f' % (
    h.meta.index, h.meta.doc_type, h.meta.id, h.meta.score))

Note

If your document has a field called meta you have to access it using the get item syntax: hit['meta'].

Aggregations

Aggregations are available through the aggregations property:

for tag in response.aggregations.per_tag.buckets:
    print(tag.key, tag.max_lines.value)

MultiSearch

If you need to execute multiple searches at the same time you can use the MultiSearch class which will use the _msearch API:

from elasticsearch_dsl import MultiSearch, Search

ms = MultiSearch(index='blogs')

ms = ms.add(Search().filter('term', tags='python'))
ms = ms.add(Search().filter('term', tags='elasticsearch'))

responses = ms.execute()

for response in responses:
    print("Results for query %r." % response.search.query)
    for hit in response:
        print(hit.title)

Persistence

You can use the dsl library to define your mappings and a basic persistent layer for your application.

Mappings

If you wish to create mappings manually you can use the Mapping class, for more advanced use cases, however, we recommend you use the DocType abstraction in combination with Index (or IndexTemplate) to define index-level settings and properties. The mapping definition follows a similar pattern to the query dsl:

from elasticsearch_dsl import Keyword, Mapping, Nested, Text

# name your type
m = Mapping('my-type')

# add fields
m.field('title', 'text')

# you can use multi-fields easily
m.field('category', 'text', fields={'raw': Keyword()})

# you can also create a field manually
comment = Nested(
                 properties={
                    'author': Text(),
                    'created_at': Date()
                 })

# and attach it to the mapping
m.field('comments', comment)

# you can also define mappings for the meta fields
m.meta('_all', enabled=False)

# save the mapping into index 'my-index'
m.save('my-index')

Note

By default all fields (with the exception of Nested) will expect single values. You can always override this expectation during the field creation/definition by passing in multi=True into the constructor (m.field('tags', Keyword(multi=True))). Then the value of the field, even if the field hasn’t been set, will be an empty list enabling you to write doc.tags.append('search').

Especially if you are using dynamic mappings it might be useful to update the mapping based on an existing type in Elasticsearch, or create the mapping directly from an existing type:

# get the mapping from our production cluster
m = Mapping.from_es('my-index', 'my-type', using='prod')

# update based on data in QA cluster
m.update_from_es('my-index', using='qa')

# update the mapping on production
m.save('my-index', using='prod')

Common field options:

multi
If set to True the field’s value will be set to [] at first access.
required
Indicates if a field requires a value for the document to be valid.

Analysis

To specify analyzer values for Text fields you can just use the name of the analyzer (as a string) and either rely on the analyzer being defined (like built-in analyzers) or define the analyzer yourself manually.

Alternatively you can create your own analyzer and have the persistence layer handle its creation:

from elasticsearch_dsl import analyzer, tokenizer

my_analyzer = analyzer('my_analyzer',
    tokenizer=tokenizer('trigram', 'nGram', min_gram=3, max_gram=3),
    filter=['lowercase']
)

Each analysis object needs to have a name (my_analyzer and trigram in our example) and tokenizers, token filters and char filters also need to specify type (nGram in our example).

Note

When creating a mapping which relies on a custom analyzer the index must either not exist or be closed. To create multiple DocType-defined mappings you can use the Index object.

DocType

If you want to create a model-like wrapper around your documents, use the DocType class:

from datetime import datetime
from elasticsearch_dsl import DocType, Date, Nested, Boolean, \
    analyzer, InnerDoc, Completion, Keyword, Text

html_strip = analyzer('html_strip',
    tokenizer="standard",
    filter=["standard", "lowercase", "stop", "snowball"],
    char_filter=["html_strip"]
)

class Comment(InnerDoc):
    author = Text(fields={'raw': Keyword()})
    content = Text(analyzer='snowball')
    created_at = Date()

    def age(self):
        return datetime.now() - self.created_at

class Post(DocType):
    title = Text()
    title_suggest = Completion()
    created_at = Date()
    published = Boolean()
    category = Text(
        analyzer=html_strip,
        fields={'raw': Keyword()}
    )

    comments = Nested(Comment)

    class Meta:
        index = 'blog'

    def add_comment(self, author, content):
        self.comments.append(
          Comment(author=author, content=content, created_at=datetime.now()))

    def save(self, ** kwargs):
        self.created_at = datetime.now()
        return super().save(** kwargs)
Note on dates

elasticsearch-dsl will always respect the timezone information (or lack thereof) on the datetime objects passed in or stored in Elasticsearch. Elasticsearch itself interprets all datetimes with no timezone information as UTC. If you wish to reflect this in your python code, you can specify default_timezone when instantiating a Date field:

class Post(DocType):
    created_at = Date(default_timezone='UTC')

In that case any datetime object passed in (or parsed from elasticsearch) will be treated as if it were in UTC timezone.

Document life cycle

Before you first use the Post document type, you need to create the mappings in Elasticsearch. For that you can either use the Index object or create the mappings directly by calling the init class method:

# create the mappings in Elasticsearch
Post.init()

To create a new Post document just instantiate the class and pass in any fields you wish to set, you can then use standard attribute setting to change/add more fields. Note that you are not limited to the fields defined explicitly:

# instantiate the document
first = Post(title='My First Blog Post, yay!', published=True)
# assign some field values, can be values or lists of values
first.category = ['everything', 'nothing']
# every document has an id in meta
first.meta.id = 47


# save the document into the cluster
first.save()

All the metadata fields (id, routing, index etc) can be accessed (and set) via a meta attribute or directly using the underscored variant:

post = Post(meta={'id': 42})

# prints 42, same as post._id
print(post.meta.id)

# override default index, same as post._index
post.meta.index = 'my-blog'

Note

Having all metadata accessible through meta means that this name is reserved and you shouldn’t have a field called meta on your document. If you, however, need it you can still access the data using the get item (as opposed to attribute) syntax: post['meta'].

To retrieve an existing document use the get class method:

# retrieve the document
first = Post.get(id=42)
# now we can call methods, change fields, ...
first.add_comment('me', 'This is nice!')
# and save the changes into the cluster again
first.save()

# you can also update just individual fields which will call the update API
# and also update the document in place
first.update(published=True, published_by='me')

If the document is not found in elasticsearch an exception (elasticsearch.NotFoundError) will be raised. If you wish to return None instead just pass in ignore=404 to suppress the exception:

p = Post.get(id='not-in-es', ignore=404)
p is None

When you wish to retrive multiple documents at the same time by their id you can use the mget method:

posts = Post.mget([42, 47, 256])

mget will, by default, raise a NotFoundError if any of the documents wasn’t found and RequestError if any of the document had resulted in error. You can control this behavior by setting parameters:

raise_on_error
If True (default) then any error will cause an exception to be raised. Otherwise all documents containing errors will be treated as missing.
missing
Can have three possible values: 'none' (default), 'raise' and 'skip'. If a document is missing or errored it will either be replaced with None, an exception will be raised or the document will be skipped in the output list entirely.

All the information about the DocType, including its Mapping can be accessed through the _doc_type attribute of the class:

# name of the index in elasticsearch
Post._doc_type.index

# the raw Mapping object
Post._doc_type.mapping

The _doc_type attribute is also home to the refresh method which will update the mapping on the DocType from elasticsearch. This is very useful if you use dynamic mappings and want the class to be aware of those fields (for example if you wish the Date fields to be properly (de)serialized):

Post._doc_type.refresh()

To delete a document just call its delete method:

first = Post.get(id=42)
first.delete()
class Meta options

In the Meta class inside your document definition you can define various metadata for your document:

doc_type
name of the doc_type in elasticsearch. By default it will be set to doc, it is not recommended to change.
index
default index for the document, by default it is empty and every operation such as get or save requires an explicit index parameter
using
default connection alias to use, defaults to 'default'
mapping
optional instance of Mapping class to use as base for the mappings created from the fields on the document class itself.
matches(self, hit)
method that returns True if a given raw hit (dict returned from elasticsearch) should be deserialized using this DocType subclass. Can be overriden, by default will just check that values for _index (including any wildcard expansions) and _type in the document matches those in _doc_type.

Any attributes on the Meta class that are instance of MetaField will be used to control the mapping of the meta fields (_all, dynamic etc). Just name the parameter (without the leading underscore) as the field you wish to map and pass any parameters to the MetaField class:

class Post(DocType):
    title = Text()

    class Meta:
        all = MetaField(enabled=False)
        dynamic = MetaField('strict')

Index

Index is a class responsible for holding all the metadata related to an index in elasticsearch - mappings and settings. It is most useful when defining your mappings since it allows for easy creation of multiple mappings at the same time. This is especially useful when setting up your elasticsearch objects in a migration:

from elasticsearch_dsl import Index, DocType, Text, analyzer

blogs = Index('blogs')

# define custom settings
blogs.settings(
    number_of_shards=1,
    number_of_replicas=0
)

# define aliases
blogs.aliases(
    old_blogs={}
)

# register a doc_type with the index
blogs.doc_type(Post)

# can also be used as class decorator when defining the DocType
@blogs.doc_type
class Post(DocType):
    title = Text()

# You can attach custom analyzers to the index

html_strip = analyzer('html_strip',
    tokenizer="standard",
    filter=["standard", "lowercase", "stop", "snowball"],
    char_filter=["html_strip"]
)

blogs.analyzer(html_strip)

# delete the index, ignore if it doesn't exist
blogs.delete(ignore=404)

# create the index in elasticsearch
blogs.create()

You can also set up a template for your indices and use the clone method to create specific copies:

blogs = Index('blogs', using='production')
blogs.settings(number_of_shards=2)
blogs.doc_type(Post)

# create a copy of the index with different name
company_blogs = blogs.clone('company-blogs')

# create a different copy on different cluster
dev_blogs = blogs.clone('blogs', using='dev')
# and change its settings
dev_blogs.setting(number_of_shards=1)

API Documentation

Below please find the documentation for the public classes and functions of elasticsearch_dsl.

Document

class elasticsearch_dsl.DocType(meta=None, **kwargs)

Model-like class for persisting documents in elasticsearch.

delete(using=None, index=None, **kwargs)

Delete the instance in elasticsearch.

Parameters:
  • index – elasticsearch index to use, if the DocType is associated with an index this can be omitted.
  • using – connection alias to use, defaults to 'default'

Any additional keyword arguments will be passed to Elasticsearch.delete unchanged.

classmethod get(id, using=None, index=None, **kwargs)

Retrieve a single document from elasticsearch using it’s id.

Parameters:
  • idid of the document to be retireved
  • index – elasticsearch index to use, if the DocType is associated with an index this can be omitted.
  • using – connection alias to use, defaults to 'default'

Any additional keyword arguments will be passed to Elasticsearch.get unchanged.

classmethod init(index=None, using=None)

Create the index and populate the mappings in elasticsearch.

classmethod mget(docs, using=None, index=None, raise_on_error=True, missing='none', **kwargs)

Retrieve multiple document by their ids. Returns a list of instances in the same order as requested.

Parameters:
  • docs – list of ids of the documents to be retireved or a list of document specifications as per https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/current/docs-multi-get.html
  • index – elasticsearch index to use, if the DocType is associated with an index this can be omitted.
  • using – connection alias to use, defaults to 'default'
  • missing – what to do when one of the documents requested is not found. Valid options are 'none' (use None), 'raise' (raise NotFoundError) or 'skip' (ignore the missing document).

Any additional keyword arguments will be passed to Elasticsearch.mget unchanged.

save(using=None, index=None, validate=True, **kwargs)

Save the document into elasticsearch. If the document doesn’t exist it is created, it is overwritten otherwise. Returns True if this operations resulted in new document being created.

Parameters:
  • index – elasticsearch index to use, if the DocType is associated with an index this can be omitted.
  • using – connection alias to use, defaults to 'default'
  • validate – set to False to skip validating the document

Any additional keyword arguments will be passed to Elasticsearch.index unchanged.

classmethod search(using=None, index=None)

Create an Search instance that will search over this DocType.

to_dict(include_meta=False)

Serialize the instance into a dictionary so that it can be saved in elasticsearch.

Parameters:include_meta – if set to True will include all the metadata (_index, _type, _id etc). Otherwise just the document’s data is serialized. This is useful when passing multiple instances into elasticsearch.helpers.bulk.
update(using=None, index=None, detect_noop=True, doc_as_upsert=False, **fields)

Partial update of the document, specify fields you wish to update and both the instance and the document in elasticsearch will be updated:

doc = MyDocument(title='Document Title!')
doc.save()
doc.update(title='New Document Title!')
Parameters:
  • index – elasticsearch index to use, if the DocType is associated with an index this can be omitted.
  • using – connection alias to use, defaults to 'default'

Any additional keyword arguments will be passed to Elasticsearch.update unchanged.

Index

class elasticsearch_dsl.Index(name, using='default')
Parameters:
  • name – name of the index
  • using – connection alias to use, defaults to 'default'
analyze(**kwargs)

Perform the analysis process on a text and return the tokens breakdown of the text.

Any additional keyword arguments will be passed to Elasticsearch.indices.analyze unchanged.

clear_cache(**kwargs)

Clear all caches or specific cached associated with the index.

Any additional keyword arguments will be passed to Elasticsearch.indices.clear_cache unchanged.

close(**kwargs)

Closes the index in elasticsearch.

Any additional keyword arguments will be passed to Elasticsearch.indices.close unchanged.

create(**kwargs)

Creates the index in elasticsearch.

Any additional keyword arguments will be passed to Elasticsearch.indices.create unchanged.

delete(**kwargs)

Deletes the index in elasticsearch.

Any additional keyword arguments will be passed to Elasticsearch.indices.delete unchanged.

delete_alias(**kwargs)

Delete specific alias.

Any additional keyword arguments will be passed to Elasticsearch.indices.delete_alias unchanged.

exists(**kwargs)

Returns True if the index already exists in elasticsearch.

Any additional keyword arguments will be passed to Elasticsearch.indices.exists unchanged.

exists_alias(**kwargs)

Return a boolean indicating whether given alias exists for this index.

Any additional keyword arguments will be passed to Elasticsearch.indices.exists_alias unchanged.

exists_type(**kwargs)

Check if a type/types exists in the index.

Any additional keyword arguments will be passed to Elasticsearch.indices.exists_type unchanged.

flush(**kwargs)

Preforms a flush operation on the index.

Any additional keyword arguments will be passed to Elasticsearch.indices.flush unchanged.

flush_synced(**kwargs)

Perform a normal flush, then add a generated unique marker (sync_id) to all shards.

Any additional keyword arguments will be passed to Elasticsearch.indices.flush_synced unchanged.

forcemerge(**kwargs)

The force merge API allows to force merging of the index through an API. The merge relates to the number of segments a Lucene index holds within each shard. The force merge operation allows to reduce the number of segments by merging them.

This call will block until the merge is complete. If the http connection is lost, the request will continue in the background, and any new requests will block until the previous force merge is complete.

Any additional keyword arguments will be passed to Elasticsearch.indices.forcemerge unchanged.

get(**kwargs)

The get index API allows to retrieve information about the index.

Any additional keyword arguments will be passed to Elasticsearch.indices.get unchanged.

get_alias(**kwargs)

Retrieve a specified alias.

Any additional keyword arguments will be passed to Elasticsearch.indices.get_alias unchanged.

get_field_mapping(**kwargs)

Retrieve mapping definition of a specific field.

Any additional keyword arguments will be passed to Elasticsearch.indices.get_field_mapping unchanged.

get_mapping(**kwargs)

Retrieve specific mapping definition for a specific type.

Any additional keyword arguments will be passed to Elasticsearch.indices.get_mapping unchanged.

get_settings(**kwargs)

Retrieve settings for the index.

Any additional keyword arguments will be passed to Elasticsearch.indices.get_settings unchanged.

get_upgrade(**kwargs)

Monitor how much of the index is upgraded.

Any additional keyword arguments will be passed to Elasticsearch.indices.get_upgrade unchanged.

open(**kwargs)

Opens the index in elasticsearch.

Any additional keyword arguments will be passed to Elasticsearch.indices.open unchanged.

put_alias(**kwargs)

Create an alias for the index.

Any additional keyword arguments will be passed to Elasticsearch.indices.put_alias unchanged.

put_mapping(**kwargs)

Register specific mapping definition for a specific type.

Any additional keyword arguments will be passed to Elasticsearch.indices.put_mapping unchanged.

put_settings(**kwargs)

Change specific index level settings in real time.

Any additional keyword arguments will be passed to Elasticsearch.indices.put_settings unchanged.

recovery(**kwargs)

The indices recovery API provides insight into on-going shard recoveries for the index.

Any additional keyword arguments will be passed to Elasticsearch.indices.recovery unchanged.

refresh(**kwargs)

Preforms a refresh operation on the index.

Any additional keyword arguments will be passed to Elasticsearch.indices.refresh unchanged.

save()

Sync the index definition with elasticsearch, creating the index if it doesn’t exist and updating its settings and mappings if it does.

Note some settings and mapping changes cannot be done on an open index (or at all on an existing index) and for those this method will fail with the underlying exception.

search()

Return a Search object searching over this index and its DocTypes.

segments(**kwargs)

Provide low level segments information that a Lucene index (shard level) is built with.

Any additional keyword arguments will be passed to Elasticsearch.indices.segments unchanged.

shard_stores(**kwargs)

Provides store information for shard copies of the index. Store information reports on which nodes shard copies exist, the shard copy version, indicating how recent they are, and any exceptions encountered while opening the shard index or from earlier engine failure.

Any additional keyword arguments will be passed to Elasticsearch.indices.shard_stores unchanged.

shrink(**kwargs)

The shrink index API allows you to shrink an existing index into a new index with fewer primary shards. The number of primary shards in the target index must be a factor of the shards in the source index. For example an index with 8 primary shards can be shrunk into 4, 2 or 1 primary shards or an index with 15 primary shards can be shrunk into 5, 3 or 1. If the number of shards in the index is a prime number it can only be shrunk into a single primary shard. Before shrinking, a (primary or replica) copy of every shard in the index must be present on the same node.

Any additional keyword arguments will be passed to Elasticsearch.indices.shrink unchanged.

stats(**kwargs)

Retrieve statistics on different operations happening on the index.

Any additional keyword arguments will be passed to Elasticsearch.indices.stats unchanged.

upgrade(**kwargs)

Upgrade the index to the latest format.

Any additional keyword arguments will be passed to Elasticsearch.indices.upgrade unchanged.

validate_query(**kwargs)

Validate a potentially expensive query without executing it.

Any additional keyword arguments will be passed to Elasticsearch.indices.validate_query unchanged.

Contribution Guide

If you have a bugfix or new feature that you would like to contribute to elasticsearch-dsl-py, please find or open an issue about it first. Talk about what you would like to do. It may be that somebody is already working on it, or that there are particular issues that you should know about before implementing the change.

We enjoy working with contributors to get their code accepted. There are many approaches to fixing a problem and it is important to find the best approach before writing too much code.

The process for contributing to any of the Elasticsearch repositories is similar.

  1. Please make sure you have signed the Contributor License Agreement. We are not asking you to assign copyright to us, but to give us the right to distribute your code without restriction. We ask this of all contributors in order to assure our users of the origin and continuing existence of the code. You only need to sign the CLA once.

  2. Run the test suite to ensure your changes do not break existing code:

    $ python setup.py test
    
  3. Rebase your changes. Update your local repository with the most recent code from the main elasticsearch-dsl-py repository, and rebase your branch on top of the latest master branch. We prefer your changes to be squashed into a single commit.

  4. Submit a pull request. Push your local changes to your forked copy of the repository and submit a pull request. In the pull request, describe what your changes do and mention the number of the issue where discussion has taken place, eg “Closes #123″. Please consider adding or modifying tests related to your changes.

Then sit back and wait. There will probably be discussion about the pull request and, if any changes are needed, we would love to work with you to get your pull request merged into elasticsearch-dsl-py.

Changelog

6.0.1 (2018-01-02)

Fixing wheel package for Python 2.7 (#803)

6.0.0 (2018-01-01)

Backwards incompatible release compatible with elasticsearch 6.0, changes include:

  • use doc as default DocType name, this change includes: * DocType._doc_type.matches method is now used to determine which DocType should be used for a hit instead of just checking _type

  • Nested and Object field refactoring using newly introduced InnerDoc class. To define a Nested/Object field just define the InnerDoc subclass and then use it when defining the field:

    class Comment(InnerDoc):
        body = Text()
        created_at = Date()
    
    class Blog(DocType):
        comments = Nested(Comment)
    
  • methods on connections singleton are now exposed on the connections module directly.

  • field values are now only deserialized when coming from elasticsearch (via from_es method) and not when assigning values in python (either by direct assignment or in __init__).

5.4.0 (2017-12-06)

  • fix ip_range aggregation and rename the class to IPRange. Iprange is kept for bw compatibility
  • fix bug in loading an aggregation with meta data from dict
  • add support for normalizer parameter of Keyword fields
  • IndexTemplate can now be specified using the same API as Index
  • Boolean field now accepts "false" as False

5.3.0 (2017-05-18)

  • fix constant score query definition
  • DateHistogramFacet now works with datetime objects
  • respect __ in field names when creating queries from dict

5.2.0 (2017-03-26)

  • make sure all response structers are pickleable (for caching)
  • adding exclude to Search
  • fix metric aggregation deserialization
  • expose all index-level APIs on Index class
  • adding delete to Search which calls delete_by_query API

5.1.0 (2017-01-08)

  • Renamed Result and ResultMeta to Hit and HitMeta respectively
  • Response now stores Search which it gets as first arg to __init__
  • aggregation results are now wrapped in classes and properly deserialized
  • Date fields now allow for numerical timestamps in the java format (in millis)
  • Added API documentation
  • replaced generated classes with manually created

5.0.0 (2016-11-04)

Version compatible with elasticsearch 5.0.

Breaking changes:

  • String field type has been deprecated in favor of Text and Keyword
  • fields method has been removed in favor of source filtering

2.2.0 (2016-11-04)

  • accessing missing string fields no longer returnd '' but returns None instead.
  • fix issues with bool’s | and & operators and minimum_should_match

2.1.0 (2016-06-29)

  • inner_hits are now also wrapped in Response
  • + operator is deprecated, .query() now uses & to combine queries
  • added mget method to DocType
  • fixed validation for “empty” values like '' and []

2.0.0 (2016-02-18)

Compatibility with Elasticsearch 2.x:

  • Filters have been removed and additional queries have been added. Instead of F objects you can now use Q.
  • Search.filter is now just a shortcut to add queries in filter context
  • support for pipeline aggregations added

Backwards incompatible changes:

  • list of analysis objects and classes was removed, any string used as tokenizer, char or token filter or analyzer will be treated as a builtin
  • internal method Field.to_python has been renamed to deserialize and an optional serialization mechanic for fields has been added.
  • Custom response class is now set by response_class method instead of a kwarg to Search.execute

Other changes:

  • FacetedSearch now supports pagination via slicing

0.0.10 (2016-01-24)

  • Search can now be iterated over to get back hits
  • Search now caches responses from Elasticsearch
  • DateHistogramFacet now defaults to returning empty intervals
  • Search no longer accepts positional parameters
  • Experimental MultiSearch API
  • added option to talk to _suggest endpoint (execute_suggest)

0.0.9 (2015-10-26)

  • FacetedSearch now uses its own Facet class instead of built in aggregations

0.0.8 (2015-08-28)

  • 0.0.5 and 0.0.6 was released with broken .tar.gz on pypi, just a build fix

0.0.5 (2015-08-27)

  • added support for (index/search)_analyzer via #143, thanks @wkiser!
  • even keys accessed via ['field'] on AttrDict will be wrapped in Attr[Dict|List] for consistency
  • Added a convenient option to specify a custom doc_class to wrap inner/Nested documents
  • blank option has been removed
  • AttributeError is no longer raised when accessing an empty field.
  • added required flag to fields and validation hooks to fields and (sub)documents
  • removed get method from AttrDict. Use getattr(d, key, default) instead.
  • added FacetedSearch for easy declarative faceted navigation

0.0.4 (2015-04-24)

  • Metadata fields (such as id, parent, index, version etc) must be stored (and retrieved) using the meta attribute (#58) on both Result and DocType objects or using their underscored variants (_id, _parent etc)
  • query on Search can now be directly assigned
  • suggest method added to Search
  • Search.doc_type now accepts DocType subclasses directly
  • Properties.property method renamed to field for consistency
  • Date field now raises ValidationException on incorrect data

0.0.3 (2015-01-23)

Added persistence layer (Mapping and DocType), various fixes and improvements.

0.0.2 (2014-08-27)

Fix for python 2

0.0.1 (2014-08-27)

Initial release.