Delete API
editDelete API
editRemoves a JSON document from the specified index.
Request
editDELETE /<index>/_doc/<_id>
Description
editYou use DELETE to remove a document from an index. You must specify the index name and document ID.
You cannot send deletion requests directly to a data stream. To delete a document in a data stream, you must target the backing index containing the document. See Update or delete documents in a backing index.
Optimistic concurrency control
editDelete operations can be made conditional and only be performed if the last
modification to the document was assigned the sequence number and primary
term specified by the if_seq_no
and if_primary_term
parameters. If a
mismatch is detected, the operation will result in a VersionConflictException
and a status code of 409. See Optimistic concurrency control for more details.
Versioning
editEach 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. The version number of a deleted document remains available for a
short time after deletion to allow for control of concurrent operations. The
length of time for which a deleted document’s version remains available is
determined by the index.gc_deletes
index setting and defaults to 60 seconds.
Routing
editIf routing is used during indexing, the routing value also needs to be specified to delete a document.
If the _routing
mapping is set to required
and no routing value is
specified, the delete API throws a RoutingMissingException
and rejects
the request.
For example:
DELETE /my-index-000001/_doc/1?routing=shard-1
This request deletes the document with id 1
, but it is routed based on the
user. The document is not deleted if the correct routing is not specified.
Automatic index creation
editIf an external versioning variant is used, the delete operation automatically creates the specified index if it does not exist. For information about manually creating indices, see create index API.
Distributed
editThe 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.
Wait for active shards
editWhen 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.
Refresh
editControl when the changes made by this request are visible to search. See
?refresh
.
Timeout
editThe 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:
DELETE /my-index-000001/_doc/1?timeout=5m
Path parameters
edit-
<index>
- (Required, string) Name of the target index.
-
<_id>
- (Required, string) Unique identifier for the document.
Query parameters
edit-
if_seq_no
- (Optional, integer) Only perform the operation if the document has this sequence number. See Optimistic concurrency control.
-
if_primary_term
- (Optional, integer) Only perform the operation if the document has this primary term. See Optimistic concurrency control.
-
refresh
-
(Optional, enum) If
true
, Elasticsearch refreshes the affected shards to make this operation visible to search, ifwait_for
then wait for a refresh to make this operation visible to search, iffalse
do nothing with refreshes. Valid values:true
,false
,wait_for
. Default:false
. -
routing
- (Optional, string) Target the specified primary shard.
-
master_timeout
-
(Optional, time units) Specifies the period of time to wait for
a connection to the master node. If no response is received before the timeout
expires, the request fails and returns an error. Defaults to
30s
. -
timeout
-
(Optional, time units) Specifies the period of time to wait for
a response. If no response is received before the timeout expires, the request
fails and returns an error. Defaults to
30s
. -
version
- (Optional, integer) Explicit version number for concurrency control. The specified version must match the current version of the document for the request to succeed.
-
version_type
-
(Optional, enum) Specific version type:
internal
,external
,external_gte
. -
wait_for_active_shards
-
(Optional, string) The number of shard copies that must be active before proceeding with the operation. Set to
all
or any positive integer up to the total number of shards in the index (number_of_replicas+1
). Default: 1, the primary shard.See Active shards.
Examples
editDelete the JSON document 1
from the my-index-000001
index:
DELETE /my-index-000001/_doc/1
The API returns the following result:
{ "_shards": { "total": 2, "failed": 0, "successful": 2 }, "_index": "my-index-000001", "_type": "_doc", "_id": "1", "_version": 2, "_primary_term": 1, "_seq_no": 5, "result": "deleted" }