Checking if an index or type exists

During the startup of an application, it's often necessary to check if an index or type exists otherwise we need to create them.

Getting ready

You need a working ElasticSearch cluster and the mapping available in the index as described in the previous recipes.

How to do it...

The HTTP method to check existence is HEAD. The URL format for checking an index is as follows:

http://<server>/<index_name>/

The URL format for checking a type is as follows:

http://<server>/<index_name>/<type>/

For checking if an index exists, we need to perform the following steps:

1. If we consider the index created in the Creating an index recipe, the call will be as follows:

   curl –i -XHEAD 'http://localhost:9200/myindex/'
   

2. If the index exists an HTTP status code 200 is returned, if missing a 404 is returned. For checking if a type exists, we need to perform the following steps:

   1. If we consider the mapping created in the Putting a mapping in an index recipe...