PLEASE NOTE:
We are working on updating this book for the latest version. Some content might be out of date.
We are working on updating this book for the latest version. Some content might be out of date.
Index Settingsedit
There are many many knobs that you can twiddle to customize index behavior, which you can read about in the Index Modules reference documentation, but…
Elasticsearch comes with good defaults. Don’t twiddle these knobs until you understand what they do and why you should change them.
Two of the most important settings are as follows:
-
number_of_shards -
The number of primary shards that an index should have,
which defaults to
5. This setting cannot be changed after index creation. -
number_of_replicas -
The number of replica shards (copies) that each primary shard
should have, which defaults to
1. This setting can be changed at any time on a live index.
For instance, we could create a small index—just one primary shard—and no replica shards with the following request:
PUT /my_temp_index
{
"settings": {
"number_of_shards" : 1,
"number_of_replicas" : 0
}
}Later, we can change the number of replica shards dynamically using the
update-index-settings API as follows:
PUT /my_temp_index/_settings
{
"number_of_replicas": 1
}