The best way that I’ve found to do it is to combine several StringIndex on a list and use a Pipeline to execute them all:
from pyspark.ml import Pipeline
from pyspark.ml.feature import StringIndexer
indexers = [StringIndexer(inputCol=column, outputCol=column+"_index").fit(df) for column in list(set(df.columns)-set(['date'])) ]
pipeline = Pipeline(stages=indexers)
df_r = pipeline.fit(df).transform(df)
df_r.show()
+-------+--------------+----+----+----------+----------+-------------+
|address| date|food|name|food_index|name_index|address_index|
+-------+--------------+----+----+----------+----------+-------------+
|1111111|20151122045510| gre| Yin| 0.0| 0.0| 0.0|
|1111111|20151122045501| gra| Yin| 2.0| 0.0| 0.0|
|1111111|20151122045500| gre| Yln| 0.0| 2.0| 0.0|
|1111112|20151122065832| gre| Yun| 0.0| 4.0| 3.0|
|1111113|20160101003221| gre| Yan| 0.0| 3.0| 1.0|
|1111111|20160703045231| gre| Yin| 0.0| 0.0| 0.0|
|1111114|20150419134543| gre| Yin| 0.0| 0.0| 5.0|
|1111115|20151123174302| ddd| Yen| 1.0| 1.0| 2.0|
|2111115| 20123192| ddd| Yen| 1.0| 1.0| 4.0|
+-------+--------------+----+----+----------+----------+-------------+