Managing indices

In the previous recipe, we saw how to initialize a client to send calls to an Elasticsearch cluster. In this recipe, we will look at how to manage indices via client calls.

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 from the Creating a client recipe in this chapter.

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

How to do it…

In Python, managing the life cycle of your indices is very easy. We will perform the following steps:

1. We initialize a client:

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

2. We need to check if the index exists, and, if so, we need to delete it:

           if es.indices.exists(index_name): 
               es.indices.delete(index_name) 
   

3. All the indices methods are available...