Matching all the documents

One of the most common queries, usually in conjunction with a filter, is the match_all query. This kind of query allows the user to return all the documents. It's often used in conjunction with filters.

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 match_all query, we will perform the following steps:

1. From the command line, we execute the query, as follows:

           curl -XPOST 'http://127.0.0.1:9200/test-index/test-
           type/_search?pretty' -d '{"query": {"match_all" : {}}}'
   

2. The result returned by Elasticsearch, if everything works, should be as follows:

     ...