Delete API

The delete API allows to delete a typed JSON document from a specific index based on its id. The following example deletes the JSON document from an index called twitter, under a type called tweet, with id valued 1:

$ curl -XDELETE 'http://localhost:9200/twitter/tweet/1'

The result of the above delete operation is:

{
    "_shards" : {
        "total" : 10,
        "failed" : 0,
        "successful" : 10
    },
    "found" : true,
    "_index" : "twitter",
    "_type" : "tweet",
    "_id" : "1",
    "_version" : 2,
    "result": "deleted"
}

Each document indexed is versioned. When deleting a document, the version can be specified to make sure the relevant document we are trying to delete is actually being deleted and it has not changed in the meantime. Every write operation executed on a document, deletes included, causes its version to be incremented.

When indexing using the ability to control the routing, in order to delete a document, the routing value should also be provided. For example:

$ curl -XDELETE 'http://localhost:9200/twitter/tweet/1?routing=kimchy'

The above will delete a tweet with id 1, but will be routed based on the user. Note, issuing a delete without the correct routing, will cause the document to not be deleted.

When the _routing mapping is set as required and no routing value is specified, the delete api will throw a RoutingMissingException and reject the request.

The parent parameter can be set, which will basically be the same as setting the routing parameter.

Note that deleting a parent document does not automatically delete its children. One way of deleting all child documents given a parent’s id is to use the Delete By Query API to perform a index with the automatically generated (and indexed) field _parent, which is in the format parent_type#parent_id.

When deleting a child document its parent id must be specified, otherwise the delete request will be rejected and a RoutingMissingException will be thrown instead.

The delete operation automatically creates an index if it has not been created before (check out the create index API for manually creating an index), and also automatically creates a dynamic type mapping for the specific type if it has not been created before (check out the put mapping API for manually creating type mapping).

The delete operation gets hashed into a specific shard id. It then gets redirected into the primary shard within that id group, and replicated (if needed) to shard replicas within that id group.

When making delete requests, you can set the wait_for_active_shards parameter to require a minimum number of shard copies to be active before starting to process the delete request. See here for further details and a usage example.

Control when the changes made by this request are visible to search. See ?refresh.

The primary shard assigned to perform the delete operation might not be available when the delete operation is executed. Some reasons for this might be that the primary shard is currently recovering from a store or undergoing relocation. By default, the delete operation will wait on the primary shard to become available for up to 1 minute before failing and responding with an error. The timeout parameter can be used to explicitly specify how long it waits. Here is an example of setting it to 5 minutes:

$ curl -XDELETE 'http://localhost:9200/twitter/tweet/1?timeout=5m'