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Common options
editCommon options
editThe following options can be applied to all of the REST APIs.
Pretty Results
editWhen appending ?pretty=true
to any request made, the JSON returned
will be pretty formatted (use it for debugging only!). Another option is
to set ?format=yaml
which will cause the result to be returned in the
(sometimes) more readable yaml format.
Human readable output
editStatistics are returned in a format suitable for humans
(eg "exists_time": "1h"
or "size": "1kb"
) and for computers
(eg "exists_time_in_millis": 3600000
or "size_in_bytes": 1024
).
The human readable values can be turned off by adding ?human=false
to the query string. This makes sense when the stats results are
being consumed by a monitoring tool, rather than intended for human
consumption. The default for the human
flag is
false
.
Date Math
editMost parameters which accept a formatted date value — such as gt
and lt
in range queries range
queries, or from
and to
in daterange
aggregations — understand date maths.
The expression starts with an anchor date, which can either be now
, or a
date string ending with ||
. This anchor date can optionally be followed by
one or more maths expressions:
-
+1h
- add one hour -
-1d
- subtract one day -
/d
- round down to the nearest day
The supported time units are: y
(year), M
(month), w
(week),
d
(day), h
(hour), m
(minute), and s
(second).
Some examples are:
|
The current time plus one hour, with ms resolution. |
|
The current time plus one hour plus one minute, with ms resolution. |
|
The current time plus one hour, rounded down to the nearest day. |
|
|
Response Filtering
editAll REST APIs accept a filter_path
parameter that can be used to reduce
the response returned by elasticsearch. This parameter takes a comma
separated list of filters expressed with the dot notation:
curl -XGET 'localhost:9200/_search?pretty&filter_path=took,hits.hits._id,hits.hits._score' { "took" : 3, "hits" : { "hits" : [ { "_id" : "3640", "_score" : 1.0 }, { "_id" : "3642", "_score" : 1.0 } ] } }
It also supports the *
wildcard character to match any field or part
of a field’s name:
curl -XGET 'localhost:9200/_nodes/stats?filter_path=nodes.*.ho*' { "nodes" : { "lvJHed8uQQu4brS-SXKsNA" : { "host" : "portable" } } }
And the **
wildcard can be used to include fields without knowing the
exact path of the field. For example, we can return the Lucene version
of every segment with this request:
curl 'localhost:9200/_segments?pretty&filter_path=indices.**.version' { "indices" : { "movies" : { "shards" : { "0" : [ { "segments" : { "_0" : { "version" : "5.2.0" } } } ], "2" : [ { "segments" : { "_0" : { "version" : "5.2.0" } } } ] } }, "books" : { "shards" : { "0" : [ { "segments" : { "_0" : { "version" : "5.2.0" } } } ] } } } }
Note that elasticsearch sometimes returns directly the raw value of a field,
like the _source
field. If you want to filter _source
fields, you should
consider combining the already existing _source
parameter (see
Get API for more details) with the filter_path
parameter like this:
curl -XGET 'localhost:9200/_search?pretty&filter_path=hits.hits._source&_source=title' { "hits" : { "hits" : [ { "_source":{"title":"Book #2"} }, { "_source":{"title":"Book #1"} }, { "_source":{"title":"Book #3"} } ] } }
Flat Settings
editThe flat_settings
flag affects rendering of the lists of settings. When
flat_settings
flag is true
settings are returned in a flat format:
{ "persistent" : { }, "transient" : { "discovery.zen.minimum_master_nodes" : "1" } }
When the flat_settings
flag is false
settings are returned in a more
human readable structured format:
{ "persistent" : { }, "transient" : { "discovery" : { "zen" : { "minimum_master_nodes" : "1" } } } }
By default the flat_settings
is set to false
.
Parameters
editRest parameters (when using HTTP, map to HTTP URL parameters) follow the convention of using underscore casing.
Boolean Values
editAll REST APIs parameters (both request parameters and JSON body) support
providing boolean "false" as the values: false
, 0
, no
and off
.
All other values are considered "true". Note, this is not related to
fields within a document indexed treated as boolean fields.
Number Values
editAll REST APIs support providing numbered parameters as string
on top
of supporting the native JSON number types.
Time units
editWhenever durations need to be specified, eg for a timeout
parameter, the
duration must specify the unit, like 2d
for 2 days. The supported units
are:
|
Year |
|
Month |
|
Week |
|
Day |
|
Hour |
|
Minute |
|
Second |
|
Milli-second |
Distance Units
editWherever distances need to be specified, such as the distance
parameter in
the Geo Distance Query), the default unit if none is specified is
the meter. Distances can be specified in other units, such as "1km"
or
"2mi"
(2 miles).
The full list of units is listed below:
Mile |
|
Yard |
|
Feet |
|
Inch |
|
Kilometer |
|
Meter |
|
Centimeter |
|
Millimeter |
|
Nautical mile |
|
The precision
parameter in the Geohash Cell Query accepts
distances with the above units, but if no unit is specified, then the
precision is interpreted as the length of the geohash.
Fuzziness
editSome queries and APIs support parameters to allow inexact fuzzy matching,
using the fuzziness
parameter. The fuzziness
parameter is context
sensitive which means that it depends on the type of the field being queried:
Numeric, date and IPv4 fields
editWhen querying numeric, date and IPv4 fields, fuzziness
is interpreted as a
+/-
margin. It behaves like a Range Query where:
-fuzziness <= field value <= +fuzziness
The fuzziness
parameter should be set to a numeric value, eg 2
or 2.0
. A
date
field interprets a long as milliseconds, but also accepts a string
containing a time value — "1h"
— as explained in Time units. An ip
field accepts a long or another IPv4 address (which will be converted into a
long).
String fields
editWhen querying string
fields, fuzziness
is interpreted as a
Levenshtein Edit Distance — the number of one character changes that need to be made to one string to
make it the same as another string.
The fuzziness
parameter can be specified as:
-
0
,1
,2
- the maximum allowed Levenshtein Edit Distance (or number of edits)
-
AUTO
-
generates an edit distance based on the length of the term. For lengths:
-
0..2
- must match exactly
-
3..5
- one edit allowed
-
>5
- two edits allowed
AUTO
should generally be the preferred value forfuzziness
. -
Result Casing
editAll REST APIs accept the case
parameter. When set to camelCase
, all
field names in the result will be returned in camel casing, otherwise,
underscore casing will be used. Note, this does not apply to the source
document indexed.
Request body in query string
editFor libraries that don’t accept a request body for non-POST requests,
you can pass the request body as the source
query string parameter
instead.