Development Notes

Testing

To run the tests:

% python setup.py test

This should automatically install the additional dependencies required for testing if you don’t have them.

Documentation

Documentation is located in docs/ and requires Sphinx to build.

To get the requirements:

% pip install Sphinx

To build the docs:

% cd docs/
% make html

Documentation committed and pushed to the main repository is available on ReadTheDocs at http://pyelasticsearch.readthedocs.org/.

Philosophy

pyelasticsearch is intended as a low-level, lossless API to elasticsearch. That is, it generally refrains from adding abstractions that limit flexibility or power. For example, it handles JSON conversion because there is a strict one-to-one mapping between JSON and Python dictionaries: nothing is lost. It converts bad HTTP status codes to exceptions, but you can still access the raw codes and responses by drilling into the exceptions.

Therefore, pyelasticsearch is a good choice for building higher-level APIs upon—ones which make common cases easier but where certain edge cases feel like “coloring outside the lines”. One such library is elasticutils. However, pyelasticsearch is also meant to be directly usable by humans: a great deal of care has been taken to keep calls brief, understandable, consistent, and error-resistant and to deal in data structures which are easy to manipulate with Python’s built-in routines.

Patches along these lines are always welcome. Thank you for trying pyelasticsearch!