Counting matched results
It is often required to return only 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 (how many posts for a blog, how many comments for a post)
Validating whether some items are available. Are there posts? Are there comments?
Getting ready
You will 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 a command line, you need to install curl for your operating system.
To correctly execute the following commands, you will need an index populated with the chapter_05/populate_query.sh script available in the online code.
How to do it...
In order to execute a counting query, we will perform the following steps:
From the command line, we will execute a count query, as follows:
curl -XGET 'http://127.0.0.1:9200/test-index/test-type/_count? ...
