It is often required to return only the count of the matched results and not the results themselves.
There are a lot of scenarios involving counting, some of them are as follows:
To return a number (for example, how many posts for a blog, how many comments for a post)
Validating if some items are available: are there posts? are there comments?
You need a working ElasticSearch cluster and an index populated with the script available in online code.
For executing a counting query, we need to perform the following steps:
From command line, we will execute the following
countquery:curl -XGET 'http://127.0.0.1:9200/test-index/test-type/_count' -d '{"match_all":{}}'The result returned by ElasticSearch, if everything is all right, should be as follows:
{ "count" : 3, "_shards" : { "total" : 5, "successful" : 5, "failed" : 0 } }
The result is composed by the count result (a long type) and the shards status at the time of the query.