Updating a document using scripts

Elasticsearch allows you to update a document in place. Updating a document using scripting reduces network traffic (otherwise, you need to fetch the document, change the field or fields, and then send them back) and improves performance when you need to process a large number of documents.

Getting ready

You will need an up-and-running Elasticsearch installation, similar to the one that we described in the Downloading and installing Elasticsearch recipe in Chapter 1, Getting Started.

To execute the commands, any HTTP client can be used, such as cURL (https://curl.haxx.se/) or Postman (https://www.getpostman.com/). You can use Kibana Console, as it provides code completion and better character escaping for Elasticsearch.

To correctly execute the following commands, you will need an index that is populated with the ch07/populate_aggregation.txt commands – these are available in the online code.

In order to be able to use regular...