Lucene 4 Cookbook

Deleting a document

The delete API allows you to delete a document by id. When documents are added to the index, an id (_id field) that is either supplied by source data or automatically generated, is always assigned. Every document in the index has to have an _id value as it's used to uniquely identify a document within an index and type. The delete API can be triggered by the HTTP DELETE method.

How to do it…

Here is a command to delete a document where the id is 1 in the news index, under type to article:

curl -XDELETE 'http://localhost:9200/news/article/1'

If the document exists, it should return a message like the following:

{"found":true,"_index":"news","_type":"article","_id":"1","_version":2}

Otherwise, it would say not found:

{"found":false,"_index":"news","_type":"article","_id":"1","_version":1} ...