Creating indexes and taking control of mapping

In the previous section, we learned how to perform CRUD operations with Elasticsearch. In the process, we saw how indexing the first document to an index that doesn't yet exist, results in the creation of the new index and the mapping of the type.

Usually, you wouldn't want to let things happen automatically, as you would want to control how indexes are created and also how mapping is created. We will see how you can take control of this process in this section and we will look at the following:

• Creating an index
• Creating a mapping
• Updating a mapping

Creating an index

You can create an index and specify the number of shards and replicas to create:

PUT /catalog
{
  ...