Read the Implementing full-text search with Elasticsearch recipe for a background on this recipe. You can read about the blinker library at https://pypi.python.org/pypi/blinker. You can view the list of core signals that are supported by Flask at http://flask.pocoo.org/docs/1.0/api/#core-signals-list. You can view the signals that are provided by Flask-SQLAlchemy at https://flask-sqlalchemy.palletsprojects.com/en/2.x/signals/.