Managing indices

In the previous recipe, we saw how to initialize a client in order to send calls to an ElasticSearch cluster. In this recipe, we will see how to manage indices via client calls.

Getting ready

You need a working ElasticSearch cluster and the packages in the Creating a client recipe of this chapter.

The full code of this recipe is in the chapter_11/indices_management.py file, available in the code bundle of this book and on GitHub (https://github.com/aparo/elasticsearch-cookbook-second-edition).

How to do it...

In Python, managing the life cycle of your indices is easy. Perform the following steps:

1. First, initialize a client, as follows:

   import elasticsearch
   es = elasticsearch.Elasticsearch()
   index_name = "my_index"

2. All the indices' methods are available in the client.indices namespace. You can create and wait for (delay) the creation of an index:

   es.indices.create(index_name)
   es.cluster.health(wait_for_status="yellow")

3. You can close/open an index, as follows...