ES|QL in the PHP client

This page helps you understand and use ES|QL in the PHP client.

There are two ways to use ES|QL in the PHP client:

• Use the Elasticsearch ES|QL API directly: This is the most flexible approach, but it’s also the most complex because you must handle results in their raw form. You can choose the precise format of results, such as JSON, CSV, or text.
• Use ES|QL mapTo($class) helper. This mapper takes care of parsing the raw response and converting into an array of objects. If you don’t specify the class using the $class parameter, the mapper uses stdClass.

ES|QL queries can be given directly as regular strings or heredoc strings, or for a more convenient option you can use the ES|QL query builder helper, which can define ES|QL queries using PHP code.

The ES|QL query API allows you to specify how results should be returned. You can choose a response format such as CSV, text, or JSON, then fine-tune it with parameters like column separators and locale.

The default response from Elasticsearch is a table in JSON, where columns is an array of descriptions and values is an array of rows containing the values.

Here’s an example query and PHP script:

 $query = <<<EOD FROM books | WHERE author == "Stephen King" | SORT rating DESC | LIMIT 10 EOD; $result = $client->esql()->query([ 'body' => ['query' => $query] ]); foreach ($result['values'] as $value) { $i=0; foreach ($result['columns'] as $col) { printf("%s : %s\n", $col['name'], $value[$i++]); } print("---\n"); } 

Here’s the JSON response from Elasticsearch:

 { "columns": [ { "name": "author", "type": "text" }, { "name": "description", "type": "text" }, { "name": "publisher", "type": "keyword" }, { "name": "rating", "type": "double" }, { "name": "title", "type": "text" }, { "name": "year", "type": "integer" } ], "values": [ [ "Stephen King", "The author ...", "Turtleback", 5.0, "How writers write", 2002 ], [ "Stephen King", "In Blockade Billy, a retired coach...", "Simon and Schuster", 5.0, "Blockade", 2010 ], [ "Stephen King", "A chilling collection of twenty horror stories.", "Signet Book", 4.55859375, "Night Shift (Signet)", 1979 ], ... ] } 

Using this response, the PHP script (provided above) produces the following output:

 author : Stephen King description : The author ... publisher : Turtleback rating : 5.0 title : How writers write year : 2002 --- author : Stephen King description : In Blockade Billy, a retired coach... publisher : Simon and Schuster rating : 5.0 title : Blockade year : 2010 --- author : Stephen King description : A chilling collection of twenty horror stories. publisher : Signet Book rating : 4.55859375 title : Night Shift (Signet) year : 1979 --- 

The following example gets ES|QL results as CSV and parses them:

 $result = $client->esql()->query([ 'format' => 'csv', 'body' => ['query' => $query] ]); var_dump($result->asArray()); 

The response looks something like this:

 array(12) { [0]=> array(6) { [0]=> string(6) "author" [1]=> string(11) "description" [2]=> string(9) "publisher" [3]=> string(6) "rating" [4]=> string(5) "title" [5]=> string(4) "year" } [1]=> array(6) { [0]=> string(12) "Stephen King" [1]=> string(249) "The author ..." [2]=> string(18) "Turtleback" [3]=> string(3) "5.0" [4]=> string(8) "How writers write" [5]=> string(4) "2002" } 

In the response, the first row contains the column descriptions and the other rows contain the values, using a plain PHP array.

Although the esql()->query() API covers many use cases, your application might require a custom mapping.

You can map the ES|QL result into an array of objects, using the mapTo() function. Here’s an example:

 $result = $client->esql()->query([ 'body' => ['query' => $query] ]); $books = $result->mapTo(); foreach ($books as $book) { printf( "%s, %s, %d, Rating: %.2f\n", $book->author, $book->title, $book->year, $book->rating ); } 

1. Array of stdClass

You can also specify a class name for the mapping. All the values will be assigned to the properties of the class.

Here’s an example mapper that returns an array of Book objects:

 class Book { public string $author; public string $title; public string $description; public int $year; public float $rating; } $result = $client->esql()->query([ 'body' => ['query' => $query] ]); $books = $result->mapTo(Book::class); 

1. Array of Book

The ES|QL query builder allows you to construct ES|QL queries using PHP syntax. Consider the following example:

 use Elastic\Elasticsearch\Helper\Esql\Query; $query = Query::from("employees") ->sort("emp_no") ->keep("first_name", "last_name", "height") ->eval(height_feet: "height * 3.281", height_cm: "height * 100") ->limit(3); 

Casting this query object to a string returns the raw ES|QL query, which you can send to the Elasticsearch ES|QL API:

 $result = $client->esql()->query([ 'body' => ['query' => (string)$query] ]); 

To construct an ES|QL query object you typically use Query::from(), although there are more source commands available. Here are some examples:

 // FROM employees $query = Query::from("employees"); // FROM <logs-{now/d}> $query = Query::from("<logs-{now/d}>"); // FROM employees-00001, other-employees-* $query = Query::from("employees-00001", "other-employees-*"); // FROM cluster_one:employees-00001, cluster_two:other-employees-* $query = Query::from("cluster_one:employees-00001", "cluster_two:other-employees-*"); // FROM employees METADATA _id $query = Query::from("employees")->metadata("_id"); 

Note how in the last example the optional METADATA clause of the FROM command is added as a chained method.

Once you have a query object, you can add one or more processing commands to it by chaining them. The following example shows how to create a query that uses the WHERE and LIMIT processing commands to filter the results:

 $query = Query::from("employees") ->where("still_hired == true") ->limit(10); 

The ES|QL documentation includes the complete list of available processing commands.

You can rely on autocompletion as an aid in constructing ES|QL queries with the query builder. Note that this requires an IDE that is configured with a PHP language server.