Creating an index

The first operation before starting to Index data in ElasticSearch is to create an index—the main container of our data.

An Index is similar to Database concept in SQL, a container for types, such as tables in SQL, and documents, such as records in SQL.

Getting ready

You will need a working ElasticSearch cluster.

How to do it...

The HTTP method to create an index is PUT (POST also works); the REST URL contains the index name:

http://<server>/<index_name>

To create an index, we will perform the following steps:

  1. Using the command line, we can execute a PUT call:
    curl -XPUT http://127.0.0.1:9200/myindex -d '{
      "settings" : {
        "index" : {
          "number_of_shards" : 2,
          "number_of_replicas" : 1
        }
      }
    }'
    
  2. The result returned by ElasticSearch, ...

Get ElasticSearch Cookbook - Second Edition now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.