We (Infoxchange) use the official elasticsearch-py, I believe it's not without it's frustrations but we've integrated Elasticsearch with part of our large database of health services in Australia as part of a complete re-write (Django) of a very old application (Perl).

You can try it out here: https://www2.hsnet.nsw.gov.au

Try searching for something like: psychiatrists near sydney cbd

The site is self is mostly just a front-end (as designed by / for a client) running across several Docker containers for the database (PostgreSQL) which is indexed into Elasticsearch and queried via the Elasticsearch API / Python ES Libraries.

If you're interested in Elasticsearch with Python / Django check out our (pretty crappy at the moment) tech blog: https://ixa.io or our github: https://github.com/infoxchange

We use https://github.com/elasticsearch/elasticsearch-py. It will certainly make like easier.

I use elasticsearch-dsl-py for constructing and testing complex queries. It's great, much easier than debugging deeply nested JSON queries.

I've had a very positive experience with elasticutils. It provides filtering syntax very similar to Django ORM filters.