Querying an Elasticsearch Server using PHP - Quick Tutorial + Examples

Querying an Elasticsearch Server using PHP - Quick Tutorial + Examples

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Elasticsearch is a full-text search engine based on Apache Lucene.

It provides an official API for a couple of languages, PHP included.

In order to install the Official PHP Client, composer is the best way to go. If you already use composer in your project, add this to composer.json:

"require": {
    "elasticsearch/elasticsearch": "~1.0"
},

Examples from here on assume you have an Elasticsearch server listening on http://localhost:9200

Creating an Index

An index is the container for your data.

<?php
    //instantiating the client
    $client = new Elasticsearch\Client(['hosts'=>'localhost:9200']);
    //setting some default options
    $params = [];
    $params['index'] = 'my_first_index';
    $params['body']['settings']['number_of_shards']   = 3;
    $params['body']['settings']['number_of_replicas'] = 2;
    //create the actual index
    $client->indices()->create($indexingParams);

Indexing a document

A document is just an array of name-value pairs. Like a Python dictionary, a Ruby Hash, a PHP associative array or a JSON object.

Indexing is the act of adding a document to your index.

($client is the client as created in the previous example)

<?php
    $indexParams = [];
    $indexParams['index'] = 'my_first_index';
    $indexParams['type'] = 'my_first_type';
    // in case there's an error, PHP doesn't hang
    $indexParams['timeout'] = 2000;
    // this is an advanced feature we don't need right now
    $indexParams['consistency'] = 'one';
    //let's index a generic person object (i.e. a PHP array)
    $obj = [];
    $obj['name'] = 'john';
    $obj['age'] = '20';
    $obj['job'] = 'clerk';
    //now you add your obj to the params
    $indexParams['body'] = $obj;
    //and index it
    $client->index($indexParams);

Making a Query

In this example, we'll use the $client we've created in the first step and submit a query using that.

<?php
    $searchParams = []; 
    $searchParams['index'] = 'my_first_index';
    $searchParams['type'] = 'my_first_type';
    // this is how you specify a query in ES
    $searchParams['body']['query']['match']['_all'] = 'my_query';
    //default sorting: _score descending (score  is a simple relevance metric)
    $searchParams['body']['sort'] = ['_score'];
    // the actual query. Results are stored in a PHP array
    $retDoc = $client->search($searchParams);

References and Observations

php elasticsearch

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