Elasticsearch Practice Exercises: Essential Techniques for Mastering the Framework

Elasticsearch Practice: Indexing and Searching Data

In this practice, we will use Elasticsearch to index and search a dataset of books. We will use the REST API to interact with Elasticsearch, so make sure you have a working installation of Elasticsearch on your machine.

Step 1: Create an Index The first step is to create an index in Elasticsearch. An index is a container for your data and acts as a logical namespace for your documents. To create an index, send a PUT request to the /index_name endpoint:

pythonCopy codecurl -XPUT 'localhost:9200/books'

Step 2: Index Data Next, we will index some book data into the books index. We will use the REST API to send a POST request to the _bulk endpoint with a JSON payload containing multiple documents:

cssCopy codecurl -XPOST 'localhost:9200/books/book/_bulk' -H 'Content-Type: application/json' -d '
{"index": {"_id": 1}}
{
    "title": "Pride and Prejudice",
    "author": "Jane Austen",
    "year": 1813,
    "category": "Literature"
}
{"index": {"_id": 2}}
{
    "title": "To Kill a Mockingbird",
    "author": "Harper Lee",
    "year": 1960,
    "category": "Literature"
}
{"index": {"_id": 3}}
{
    "title": "The Great Gatsby",
    "author": "F. Scott Fitzgerald",
    "year": 1925,
    "category": "Literature"
}
'

Step 3: Search Data Now that we have indexed some data, we can search for it using the REST API. To search for all documents in the books index, we can use the following request:

pythonCopy codecurl -XGET 'localhost:9200/books/_search?pretty'

This will return a JSON object with the search results, which will include all documents in the index. To search for specific books, we can use query parameters, such as q to search for a specific term, or sort to sort the results:

pythonCopy codecurl -XGET 'localhost:9200/books/_search?q=author:Austen&sort=year:asc&pretty'

This will search for books by the author “Austen” and sort the results by the year field in ascending order.

Conclusion In this practice, we used Elasticsearch to index and search a dataset of books. We used the REST API to create an index, index data, and search for data. This is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the capabilities of Elasticsearch, but it provides a good foundation for exploring more advanced features and use cases.