Counting matched results
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, such as the following:
- To return the number of something (how many posts for a blog, how many comments for a post).
- Validating whether some items are available. Are there posts? Are there comments?
Getting ready
You need an up-and-running Elasticsearch installation, as we described in the Downloading and installing Elasticsearch recipe in Chapter 1, Getting Started.
To execute these commands, any HTTP client can be used, such as curl (https://curl.haxx.se/), postman (https://www.getpostman.com/), or similar. I suggest using the Kibana console as it provides code completion and better character escaping for Elasticsearch.
To correctly execute the following commands, you will need an index populated with the ch04/populate_kibana.txt commands, which is available in the online code.
How to do it...
In order to execute a counting...
