Counting matched results

Often, it is necessary to only return 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 (for example, the number of posts on a blog and the number of comments on a post).
• If you need to validate whether some items are available, For example, are there posts? Are there comments?

Getting ready

You will need an up-and-running Elasticsearch installation, as described in the Downloading and installing Elasticsearch recipe of 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 ...