Nice 4 step tutorial on building a RESTful API using Python, by K. P. Kaiser. The best tip was a pointer to elasticutils, an ElasticSearch library:
It’s always a good idea to see what your options are in a library. Initially, when I was building this integration I saw pyes, a very well written library, but the code to use it seemed a bit ugly for my tastes.
Luckily, after a bit more searching, I found elasticutils, which is, in my opinion, a much cleaner interface to the very simple elasticsearch server. It always pays to take a few minutes to read the introduction, and example code before deciding on a library. Elasticutils actually uses pyes under the covers.