You need a working ElasticSearch cluster with the thrift plugin installed (https://github.com/elasticsearch/elasticsearch-transport-thrift/) the standard port for thrift protocol is 9500.

In java using ElasticSearch generated classes, creating a client is quite easy as shown in the following code snippet:

import org.apache.thrift.protocol.TBinaryProtocol;
import org.apache.thrift.protocol.TProtocol;
import org.apache.thrift.transport.TSocket;
import org.apache.thrift.transport.TTransport;
import org.apache.thrift.transport.TTransportException;
import org.elasticsearch.thrift.*;


TTransport transport = new TSocket("127.0.0.1", 9500);
TProtocol protocol = new TBinaryProtocol(transport);
Rest.Client client = new Rest.Client(protocol);
transport.open();

To initialize a connection, first we need to open a socket transport. This is done with the TSocket (host/port), using the ElasticSearch thrift standard port 9500.

Then the Socket Transport Protocol must be encapsulated in a Binary Protocol—this is done with the TBinaryProtocol (transport).

Now, a client can be initialized by passing the protocol. The Rest-Client and other utilities classes are generated by elasticsearch.thrift, and live in the org.elasticsearch.thrift namespace.

To have a fully working client, we must open the socket (transport.open()).

At the end of program, we should clean the socket closing it (transport.close()).

Some drivers to connect to ElasticSearch provide a simple to use API to interact with thrift without the boulder that this protocol needs.

For advanced usage, I suggest the use of the Thrift protocol to bypass some problems related with HTTP limits. They are as follows:

A big advantage of this protocol is that on server side it wraps the REST entry points so it can be also used with calls provided by external REST plugins.