Executing a date histogram aggregation

The previous recipe used mainly numeric fields. Elasticsearch provides special functionalities to compute the date histogram aggregation, which operates on date or datetime values.

This aggregation is required because date values need more customization to solve problems, such as timezone conversion and special time intervals.

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. Using Kibana Console is recommended, 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 ch07/populate_aggregation.sh commands available in the online code.

The index that’...