Dynamic Mapping

One of the most important features of Elasticsearch is that it tries to get out of your way and let you start exploring your data as quickly as possible. To index a document, you don’t have to first create an index, define a mapping type, and define your fields — you can just index a document and the index, type, and fields will spring to life automatically:

PUT data/counters/1 
{ "count": 5 }

The automatic detection and addition of new types and fields is called dynamic mapping. The dynamic mapping rules can be customised to suit your purposes with:

Automatic type creation can be disabled per-index by setting the index.mapper.dynamic setting to false in the index settings:

PUT data/_settings
{
  "index.mapper.dynamic":false 
}

Automatic type creation can also be disabled for all indices by setting an index template:

PUT _template/template_all
{
  "template": "*",
  "order":0,
  "settings": {
    "index.mapper.dynamic": false 
  }
}

Regardless of the value of this setting, types can still be added explicitly when creating an index or with the PUT mapping API.