Managing documents

The APIs for managing a document (index, update, and delete) are the most important after the search ones. In this recipe, we will see how to use them in a standard way and in bulk actions to improve performances.

Getting ready

You need an up-and-running Elasticsearch installation, as we described in the Downloading and installing Elasticsearch recipe in Chapter 2, Downloading and Setup.

You also need the Python installed packages of Creating a client recipe of this chapter.

The full code for this recipe can be found in the chapter_16/document_management.py file.

How to do it…

The three main operations to manage the documents are as follows:

• index: This operation stores a document in Elasticsearch. It is mapped on the index API call.

• update: This allows updating some values in a document. This operation is composed internally (via Lucene) by deleting the previous document and re-indexing the document with the new values. It is mapped to the update API call.

• delete: This delete...