# Elasticsearch > [Elasticsearch](https://www.elastic.co/elasticsearch/) is a distributed, RESTful search and analytics engine. > It provides a distributed, multi-tenant-capable full-text search engine with an HTTP web interface and schema-free > JSON documents. ## Installation and Setup There are two ways to get started with Elasticsearch: #### Install Elasticsearch on your local machine via docker Example: Run a single-node Elasticsearch instance with security disabled. This is not recommended for production use. ```bash docker run -p 9200:9200 -e "discovery.type=single-node" -e "xpack.security.enabled=false" -e "xpack.security.http.ssl.enabled=false" docker.elastic.co/elasticsearch/elasticsearch:8.9.0 ``` #### Deploy Elasticsearch on Elastic Cloud Elastic Cloud is a managed Elasticsearch service. Signup for a [free trial](https://cloud.elastic.co/registration?storm=langchain-notebook). ### Install Client ```bash pip install elasticsearch ``` ## Vector Store The vector store is a simple wrapper around Elasticsearch. It provides a simple interface to store and retrieve vectors. ```python from langchain.vectorstores import ElasticsearchStore from langchain.document_loaders import TextLoader from langchain.text_splitter import CharacterTextSplitter loader = TextLoader("./state_of_the_union.txt") documents = loader.load() text_splitter = CharacterTextSplitter(chunk_size=500, chunk_overlap=0) docs = text_splitter.split_documents(documents) embeddings = OpenAIEmbeddings() db = ElasticsearchStore.from_documents( docs, embeddings, es_url="http://localhost:9200", index_name="test-basic", ) db.client.indices.refresh(index="test-basic") query = "What did the president say about Ketanji Brown Jackson" results = db.similarity_search(query) ```