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WARNING: Version 2.0 of Elasticsearch has passed its EOL date.

This documentation is no longer being maintained and may be removed. If you are running this version, we strongly advise you to upgrade. For the latest information, see the current release documentation.

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Elastic Docs ›Elasticsearch Guide [2.0] ›Search APIs ›Request Body Search

Preference

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Preference

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Controls a preference of which shard replicas to execute the search request on. By default, the operation is randomized between the shard replicas.

The preference is a query string parameter which can be set to:

_primary

The operation will go and be executed only on the primary shards.

_primary_first

The operation will go and be executed on the primary shard, and if not available (failover), will execute on other shards.

_replica

The operation will go and be executed only on a replica shard.

_replica_first

The operation will go and be executed only on a replica shard, and if not available (failover), will execute on other shards.

_local

The operation will prefer to be executed on a local allocated shard if possible.

_only_node:xyz

Restricts the search to execute only on a node with the provided node id (xyz in this case).

_prefer_node:xyz

Prefers execution on the node with the provided node id (xyz in this case) if applicable.

_shards:2,3

Restricts the operation to the specified shards. (2 and 3 in this case). This preference can be combined with other preferences but it has to appear first: _shards:2,3;_primary

_only_nodes

Restricts the operation to nodes specified in node specification https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/current/cluster.html

Custom (string) value

A custom value will be used to guarantee that the same shards will be used for the same custom value. This can help with "jumping values" when hitting different shards in different refresh states. A sample value can be something like the web session id, or the user name.

For instance, use the user’s session ID to ensure consistent ordering of results for the user:

curl localhost:9200/_search?preference=xyzabc123 -d '
{
    "query": {
        "match": {
            "title": "elasticsearch"
        }
    }
}
'
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