Working with Elastica Client Object

Connecting to Elasticsearch

Note

Assuming you have elasticsearch set up and running.

Running a single node

When your single elasticsearch node is running on localhost:9200, which is the default, you can simply connect:

<?php

$elasticaClient = new \Elastica\Client();

Running a cluster

Elasticsearch was built with the cloud / multiple distributed servers in mind. It is quite easy to start a elasticsearch cluster simply by starting multiple instances of elasticsearch on one server or on multiple servers. To start multiple instances of elasticsearch on your local machine, just run the command to start an instance in the elasticsearch folder twice.

One of the goals of the distributed search index is availability. If one server goes down, search results should still be served. But if the client connects to only the server that just went down, no results are returned anymore. Because of this, \Elastica\Client supports multiple servers which are accessed in a round robin algorithm. This is the only and also most basic option at the moment. So if we start a node on port 9200 and port 9201 above, we pass the following arguments to \Elastica\Client to access both servers:

<?php

$elasticClient = new \Elastica\Client(array(
    'servers' => array(
        array('host' => 'localhost', 'port' => 9200),
        array('host' => 'localhost', 'port' => 9201)
    )
));

Note

A callback function can be passed as a second parameter while creating the client object.

Client Configurations

Generally, an elastica client object consists of the following parameters:

Parameter	Default Value	Additional Info
host	null
port	null
path	null
url	null
proxy	null
transport	null
persistent	true
timeout	null
connections	[]
roundRobin	false
log	false	Set to true, to enable logging, set a string to log to a specific file
retryOnConflict	0	Used while updating a document.
bigintConversion	false	Set to true to enable the JSON bigint to string conversion option (see issue #717)
username	null
password	null

Note

You may find an additional connectionStrategy parameter which is set to RoundRobin or Simple depending on the roundRobin flag being true or false respectively.

Lookup the client configuration

The current configuration of an elastica client can be found using the getConfig() and getConfigValue() methods.

The getConfig() method returns the whole config of the elastica client object as an array. Optionally, a key can be passed to fetch specific information.

<?php

$elasticClient->getConfig();       // Will return the whole config

$elasticClient->getConfig('host'); // Will return the host

$elasticClient->getConfig('port'); // Will return the port

The getConfigValue() method compulsorily requires a key parameter which fetches the required information. Optionally, a second parameter can be passed as a default value. The default value is returned in case the key is not found to be present in the config.

<?php

$elasticClient->getConfigValue('host');           // Will return the host

$elasticClient->getConfigValue('host', 'foo');    // Will return the host

$elasticClient->getConfigValue('hosting', 'foo'); // Will return 'foo'

Set/Overwrite the client configuration

An array can be passed to setConfig() method which will add/update new values to the existing client config while retaining the default values.

<?php

$elasticClient->setConfig( array( 'port' => '9201' ) ); // Will set the port to 9201 and retain the default values for the rest

However, to set a specific value, it is better to use the setConfigValue() method with the key and value passed as parameters.

<?php

$elasticClient->setConfigValue('port', '9201'); // Will set the port to 9201 and retain the default values for the rest