What causes "elasticsearch.exceptions.ConnectionError: ConnectionError ... error('getaddrinfo() argument 2 must be integer or string',)))

Question

With this minimal code:

import elasticsearch
es = elasticsearch.Elasticsearch([{u'host': u'127.0.0.1', u'port': u'9200'}])

# then do anything involving a connection, eg:
es.indices.exists_alias('foo')

And I'm getting this error:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
  File "/home/johnc/.virtualenvs/myproject/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/elasticsearch/client/utils.py", line 68, in _wrapped
    return func(*args, params=params, **kwargs)
  File "/home/johnc/.virtualenvs/myproject/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/elasticsearch/client/indices.py", line 348, in exists_alias
    params=params)
  File "/home/johnc/.virtualenvs/myproject/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/elasticsearch/transport.py", line 276, in perform_request
    status, headers, data = connection.perform_request(method, url, params, body, ignore=ignore, timeout=timeout)
  File "/home/johnc/.virtualenvs/myproject/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/elasticsearch/connection/http_urllib3.py", line 51, in perform_request
    raise ConnectionError('N/A', str(e), e)
elasticsearch.exceptions.ConnectionError: ConnectionError(('Connection aborted.', error('getaddrinfo() argument 2 must be integer or string',))) caused by: ProtocolError(('Connection aborted.', error('getaddrinfo() argument 2 must be integer or string',)))

What's happening?

Answer 1

It seems urllib3 (version 1.9 at least) doesn't like the port being passed in as a unicode string. Changing port to a byte string or an int, fixes this, ie:

es = elasticsearch.Elasticsearch([{u'host': u'127.0.0.1', u'port': b'9200'}])

or

es = elasticsearch.Elasticsearch([{u'host': u'127.0.0.1', u'port': 9200}])