Deleting a document

Deleting documents in Elasticsearch is possible in two ways: using the DELETE call or the delete_by_query call, which we'll see in the next chapter.

Getting ready

You need an up-and-running Elasticsearch installation, as used in the Downloading and installing Elasticsearch recipe in Chapter 2, Downloading and Setup.

To execute curl via the command line, you need to install curl for your operative system.

To correctly execute the following commands, use the indexed document in the Indexing a document recipe.

How to do it...

The REST API URL is the same as the GET calls, but the HTTP method is DELETE:

http://<server>/<index_name>/<type_name>/<id>

To delete a document, we will perform the following steps:

1. If we consider the order indexed in the Indexing a document recipe, the call to delete a document will be:

           curl -XDELETE 
           'http://localhost:9200/myindex/order/2qLrAfPVQvCRMe7Ku8r0Tw'
   

2. The result returned by Elasticsearch should be...