ElasticUtils: I'm stepping down and deprecating the project

, Will Kahn-Greene | share this (mastodon)
Note: This is an old post in a blog with a lot of posts over a long span of time. The world has changed, technologies have changed, and I've changed. It's likely this is out of date, the code doesn't work, the ideas haven't aged well, or the ideas were terrible to begin with. Let me know if you think this is something that needs updating.

What is^Wwas it?

ElasticUtils is^Wwas a Python library for building and executing Elasticsearch searches.

See the Quickstart for more details.

I'm stepping down as maintainer and ending the project.

I'm taking my ball and going home

For the last few years, I've maintained ElasticUtils. It's a project I picked up after Jeff, Dave and Erik left.

Since I picked it up, we've had 13 or so releases. We switched the underlying library from pyes to pyelasticsearch and then to elasticsearch-py. We added support for a variety of Elasticsearch versions up to about 1.0. We overhauled the documentation. We overhauled the test suite. We generalized it from just a Django library into a library with a Django extension. We added MappingTypes. We worked really hard to make it backwards compatible from version to version. It's been a lot of work, but mostly in spurts.

Since the beginning of the project in May 2011 (a year before I picked up maintenance), we've had 33 people contribute patches. We've had many more point out issues, ask questions on the #elasticutils IRC channel, send me email about this and that.

That's a good run for an open source project. There are a bunch of things I wish I had done differently when I was at the helm, but it's a good run nonetheless.

The current state of things, however, is not great. ElasticUtils has a ton of issues. Lots of technical debt accrued over the years, several architectural decisions that turned out to suck and have obnoxious consequences, lack of support for new features in Elasticsearch > 1.0, etc. It'll take a lot of work to clean that up. Plus it's got a CamelCase name and that's so passé.

At PyCon 2014, Rob, Jannis and I worked with Honza on the API for the library that is now elasticsearch-dsl-py. This library has several of the things I like about ElasticUtils. It's a project that's being supported by the Elasticsearch folks. It's got momentum. It supports many of the Elasticsearch > 1.0 features. There are several libraries that sit on top of elasticsearch-dsl-py as Django shims now.

ElasticUtils is at a point where it's got a lot of problems and there are good alternatives that are better supported.

Thus, this is an excellent time for me to step down as maintainer. Going forward from today, I won't be doing any more development or maintenance.

Further, I'm deprecating the project because no one should be using an unmaintained broken project when there are better supported alternatives. That way lies madness!

So, if you're using ElasticUtils, what do you do now?

ElasticUtils 0.10.2 has the things you need to bridge from Elasticsearch 0.90 to 1.x. You could upgrade to that version and then switch to elasticsearch-dsl-py or one of the Django shims.

On that note, so long ElasticUtils and thank you to everyone who's helped on and used ElasticUtils over the years!

Want to comment? Send an email to willkg at bluesock dot org. Include the url for the blog entry in your comment so I have some context as to what you're talking about.