Elasticsearch: evacuate all data before shutdown of a data node?

Question

Is there a way to tell a node to remove all of its data (spread it back out among the other nodes) so that I can shut it down and not deal with a rebalance/re-replicate once its down?

If I have 2 copies of each shard, and I drop one node, some of the shards now only have 1 live copy and it has to be re-replicated. I'd prefer to not drop down to 1 live copy for any period of time if I can.

Answer 1

After posting to the ES mailing list, I was informed the proper answer lies in the _cluster/settings api, specifically the cluster.routing.allocation.exclude._ip option.

From the docs: http://www.elasticsearch.org/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/current/modules-cluster.html

curl -XPUT localhost:9200/_cluster/settings -d '{
  "transient" : {
    "cluster.routing.allocation.exclude._ip" : "10.0.0.1"
  }
}'

The IP address can be a comma separated list. To 'un-exclude', just remove the IP from the list (or set the list to "" to remove all excluded IPs).

Hopefully this helps others looking for the answer to this same question.