Retrieving a document by ID in Elasticsearch - Mini Project: Build & Apply

Retrieving a document by ID

📖 Scenario: You are working with an Elasticsearch database that stores information about books in a library. Each book is stored as a document with a unique ID.You want to learn how to retrieve a specific book's details by using its document ID.

🎯 Goal: Build a simple Elasticsearch query to retrieve a document by its ID from the library index.

📋 What You'll Learn

Create a variable with the document ID to search for

Create a variable with the index name library

Write the Elasticsearch query to get the document by ID

Print the retrieved document's source content

💡 Why This Matters

🌍 Real World

Retrieving documents by ID is a common task in search engines and databases to quickly access specific records.

💼 Career

Knowing how to query Elasticsearch by document ID is important for backend developers, data engineers, and search specialists working with Elasticsearch.

1

Set up the document ID and index name

Create a variable called doc_id and set it to "book_123". Also create a variable called index_name and set it to "library".

Elasticsearch

  # Your code here

Need a hint?

Use simple assignment to create the variables doc_id and index_name.

2

Import Elasticsearch client and create connection

Import Elasticsearch from elasticsearch and create a client instance called es with default settings.

Elasticsearch

doc_id = "book_123"
index_name = "library"
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use from elasticsearch import Elasticsearch and then es = Elasticsearch() to connect.

3

Retrieve the document by ID

Use the es.get() method with index=index_name and id=doc_id to get the document. Store the result in a variable called result.

Elasticsearch

from elasticsearch import Elasticsearch

doc_id = "book_123"
index_name = "library"
es = Elasticsearch()
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Call es.get() with the correct index and id arguments.

4

Print the retrieved document source

Print the _source field from the result variable to display the document content.

Elasticsearch

from elasticsearch import Elasticsearch

doc_id = "book_123"
index_name = "library"
es = Elasticsearch()

result = es.get(index=index_name, id=doc_id)
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use print(result['_source']) to show the document details.