Async Serach Client is a Python async client for the MeiliSearch API. MeiliSearch also has an official Python client.
Which of the two clients to use comes down to your particular use case. The purpose for this async client is to allow for non-blocking calls when working in async frameworks such as FastAPI, or if your own code base you are working in is async. If this does not match your use case then the official client will be a better choice.
For the most part this client mirrors the functionality of the official client and the same documenation will apply. There are are few exceptions to this to be aware of:
-
The async client runs in a context manager. This means to create a client, instead of:
client = Client("http://127.0.0.1:7700", "masterKey")
In the async client it would be:
async with Client("http://127.0.0.1:7700", "masterKey") as client: ...
-
Because this client is async you need to await the calls. For example adding documents with the official verison of the client would be:
index.add_documents(documents)
In the async client it would be:
await index.add_documents(documents)
-
The async client uses Pydantic to serialize/deserialize the JSON from MeiliSearch into Python objects wherever possible, and in the process converts the camelCaseNames from JSON into more Pythonic snake_case_names. The official client instead uses dictionaries to store the return values in most cases.
In some instances it is not possible to return the data as an object, becase the structure will be dependant on your particular dataset and can't be known ahead of time. In these instances you can either work with the data in the dictionary that is returned, or because you will know the structure you can generate your own Classes.
As an example, if you want to get a movie from the small movies example you could put the results into an object with the following
from datetime import datetime
from typing import Optional
from async_search_client import Client
from async_search_client.models import CamelBase
# Inheriting from CamelBase will allow your class to automatically convert
# variables returned from the server in camelCase into snake_case. It will
# also make it a Pydantic Model.
class Movie(CamelBase):
id: int
title: str
poster: str
overview: str
release_date: datetime
genre: Optional[str]
async with Client("http://127.0.0.1:7700", "masterKey") as client:
index = client.index("movies")
movie_dict = await index.get_document(287947)
movie = Movie(**movie_dict)And then the movie variable would contain the movie object with the following information
Movie(
id = 287947,
title = "Shazam!",
poster = "https://image.tmdb.org/t/p/w1280/xnopI5Xtky18MPhK40cZAGAOVeV.jpg",
overview = "A boy is given the ability to become an adult superhero in times of need with a single magic word.",
release_date = datetime.datetime(2019, 3, 23, 0, 0, tzinfo=datetime.timezone.utc),
genre = "action",
)By inheriting from CamelBase, or any of the other provided models you will be inheriting Pydantic models and therefore have access to the funcitonality Pydantic provides such as validators and Fields. Pydantic will also automatically deserialized the data into the correct data type based on the type hint provided.
Using a virtual environmnet is recommended for installing this package. Once the virtual environment is created and activated install the package with:
pip install async-search-clientThere are several ways to run MeiliSearch. Pick the one that works best for your use case and then start the server.
As as example to use Docker:
docker pull getmeili/meilisearch:latest
docker run -it --rm -p 7700:7700 getmeili/meilisearch:latest ./meilisearch --master-key=masterKey- Note: `client.index("books") creates an instance of an Index object but does not make a network call to send the data yet so it does not need to be awaited.
from async_search_client import Client
async with Client('http://127.0.0.1:7700', 'masterKey') as client:
index = client.index("books")
documents = [
{"id": 1, "title": "Ready Player One"},
{"id": 42, "title": "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy"},
]
await index.add_documents(documents)The server will return a update id that can be used to get the status of the updates. To do this you would save the result response from adding the documets to a variable, this will be a UpdateId object, and use it to check the status of the updates.
update = await index.add_documents(documents)
status = await client.index('books').get_update_status(update.update_id)Splitting documents into batches can be useful with large dataset because it reduces the RAM usage during indexing.
from async_search_client import Client
async with Client('http://127.0.0.1:7700', 'masterKey') as client:
index = client.index("books")
documents = [
{"id": 1, "title": "Ready Player One"},
{"id": 42, "title": "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy"},
...
]
await index.add_documents_in_batches(documents, batch_size=20)The server will return a list of update ids that can be used to get the status of the updates. To do this you would save the result response from adding the documets to a variable, this will be a list of UpdateId objects, and use it to check the status of the updates.
updates = await index.add_documents_in_batches(documents, batch_size=20)
for update in updates:
status = await client.index('books').get_update_status(update.update_id)search_result = await index.search("ready player")SearchResults(
hits = [
{
"id": 1,
"title": "Ready Player One",
},
],
offset = 0,
limit = 20,
nb_hits = 1,
exhaustive_nb_hits = bool,
facets_distributionn = None,
processing_time_ms = 1,
query = "ready player",
)Information about the parameters can be found in the search parameters section of the documentation.
index.search(
"guide",
attributes_to_highlight=["title"],
filters="book_id > 10"
)SearchResults(
hits = [
{
"id": 42,
"title": "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy",
"_formatted": {
"id": 42,
"title": "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the <em>Galaxy</em>"
}
},
],
offset = 0,
limit = 20,
nb_hits = 1,
exhaustive_nb_hits = bool,
facets_distributionn = None,
processing_time_ms = 5,
query = "galaxy",
)The following methods are unique to this client and are not currently available in the official client, or in the MeiliSearch documentation
-
add_documents_from_file:
Add documents to an index from a json file. The file must have a .json extension. The file path can be passed either as a string or as a Path object.
index = test_client.index("movies") response = await index.add_documents_from_file("/path/to/file.json")
-
update_documents_from_file:
Update documents in an index from a json file. The file must have a .json extension. The file path can be passed either as a string or as a Path object.
index = test_client.index("movies") response = await index.update_documents_from_file("/path/to/file.json")
This package only guarantees the compatibility with version v0.20.0 of MeiliSearch.
For more see the API Reference in the MeiliSearch documentation. Keep in mind you will need to await the examples shown in the documentation, and that you will be getting python objects instead of JSON for you results.
Contributions to this project are welcome. If you are interesting in contributing please see our contributing guide