Using index aliases

Real world applications have a lot of indices and queries that span on more indices. This scenario requires defining all the names of indices on which to we need to perform queries; aliases allow grouping them in a common name.

Some common scenarios of this usage are as follows:

• Log indices divided by date (that is, log_YYMMDD) for which we want to create an alias for the last week, the last month, today, yesterday, and so on

• "Collecting" website contents in several indices (New York Times, The Guardian, and so on) for those we want to refer as an index alias "sites"

Getting ready

You need a working ElasticSearch cluster.

How to do it...

The URL format for control aliases are as follows:

http://<server>/_aliases

For managing the index aliases, we need to perform the following steps:

1. We are reading aliases status via REST API, so the method will be GET and an example of call is as follows:

   curl -XGET 'http://localhost:9200/_aliases'
   

2. You will get a response similar to the...