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.
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:
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 } } }'
The result returned by ElasticSearch, if everything goes well, should be:
{"acknowledged":true}If the index already exists, then a 400 error is returned:
{"error":"IndexAlreadyExistsException[[myindex] Already exists]","status":400}