Explaining a query

When executing searches, it's very common to have documents that don't match the query as expected. To easily debug these scenarios, Elasticsearch provides the explain query call.

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...

The steps required to execute the explain query call are as follows:

1. From the command line, we will execute an explain query against a document as follows:

           curl -XGET 'http://127.0.0.1:9200/test-index/test-
           type/1/_explain?pretty' -d '{
               "query": {
                   "term": {
                       "uuid": "11111"
                   }...