Opening/closing an index

If you want to keep your data but save resources (memory/CPU), a good alternative to deleting an index is to close them.

ElasticSearch allows to open/close an index for putting it in the online/offline mode.

Getting ready

You need a working ElasticSearch cluster and the index created in the Creating an index recipe.

How to do it...

For opening/closing an index, we need to perform the following steps:

1. From command line, we can execute a POST call to close an index as follows:

   curl -XPOST http://127.0.0.1:9200/myindex/_close
   

2. If the call is successfully made, the result returned by ElasticSearch should be as follows:

   {"ok":true,"acknowledged":true}

3. To open an index from command line use the following command:

   curl -XPOST http://127.0.0.1:9200/myindex/_open
   

4. If the call is successfully made, the result returned by ElasticSearch should be as follows:

   {"ok":true,"acknowledged":true}

How it works...

When an index is closed, there is no overhead on the cluster (except for metadata state...