WARNING: Version 5.4 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.
Create Index
editCreate Index
editThe create index API allows to instantiate an index. Elasticsearch provides support for multiple indices, including executing operations across several indices.
Index Settings
editEach index created can have specific settings associated with it.
Default for |
|
Default for |
The above second curl example shows how an index called twitter
can be
created with specific settings for it using YAML.
In this case, creating an index with 3 shards, each with 2 replicas. The
index settings can also be defined with JSON:
PUT twitter { "settings" : { "index" : { "number_of_shards" : 3, "number_of_replicas" : 2 } } }
or more simplified
PUT twitter { "settings" : { "number_of_shards" : 3, "number_of_replicas" : 2 } }
You do not have to explicitly specify index
section inside the
settings
section.
For more information regarding all the different index level settings that can be set when creating an index, please check the index modules section.
Mappings
editThe create index API allows to provide a set of one or more mappings:
PUT test { "settings" : { "number_of_shards" : 1 }, "mappings" : { "type1" : { "properties" : { "field1" : { "type" : "text" } } } } }
Aliases
editThe create index API allows also to provide a set of aliases:
PUT test { "aliases" : { "alias_1" : {}, "alias_2" : { "filter" : { "term" : {"user" : "kimchy" } }, "routing" : "kimchy" } } }
Wait For Active Shards
editBy default, index creation will only return a response to the client when the primary copies of each shard have been started, or the request times out. The index creation response will indicate what happened:
{ "acknowledged": true, "shards_acknowledged": true }
acknowledged
indicates whether the index was successfully created in the cluster, while
shards_acknowledged
indicates whether the requisite number of shard copies were started for
each shard in the index before timing out. Note that it is still possible for either
acknowledged
or shards_acknowledged
to be false
, but the index creation was successful.
These values simply indicate whether the operation completed before the timeout. If
acknowledged
is false
, then we timed out before the cluster state was updated with the
newly created index, but it probably will be created sometime soon. If shards_acknowledged
is false
, then we timed out before the requisite number of shards were started (by default
just the primaries), even if the cluster state was successfully updated to reflect the newly
created index (i.e. acknowledged=true
).
We can change the default of only waiting for the primary shards to start through the index
setting index.write.wait_for_active_shards
(note that changing this setting will also affect
the wait_for_active_shards
value on all subsequent write operations):
PUT test { "settings": { "index.write.wait_for_active_shards": "2" } }
or through the request parameter wait_for_active_shards
:
PUT test?wait_for_active_shards=2
A detailed explanation of wait_for_active_shards
and its possible values can be found
here.