Managing index settings

Index settings are more important because they allow to control several important ElasticSearch functionalities such as sharding/replica, caching, term management, routing, and analysis.

Getting ready

You need a working ElasticSearch cluster and the index created in the Creating an index recipe

How to do it...

For managing the index settings, we need to perform the following steps:

1. To retrieve the settings of your current index, the URL format is as follows:

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

2. We are reading information via the REST API, so the method will be GET and an example of call, using the index create in the Creating an index recipe, is as follows:

   curl -XGET 'http://localhost:9200/myindex/_settings'
   

3. The response will be something similar to the following one:

   {
       "myindex": {
           "settings": {
               "index.number_of_replicas": "1",
               "index.number_of_shards": "2",
               "index.version.created": "900199"
           }
       ...