Updating a document

Documents stored in Elasticsearch can be updated during their lives. There are two available solutions for performing this operation in Elasticsearch: adding a new document, or using the update call.

The update call can work in two ways:

• By providing a script that uses the update strategy
• By providing a document that must be merged with the original one

The main advantage of an update versus an index is the networking reduction.

Getting ready

You need an up-and-running Elasticsearch installation, as we described in the Downloading and installing Elasticsearch recipe in Chapter 1, Getting Started.

To execute these commands, HTTP clients can be used, such as curl (https://curl.haxx.se/), postman...