Elasticsearch: get a list of indexes

Question

Is it possible to get a list of indexes that match a certain pattern e.g

this is how to get a list of indexes:

curl -XGET 'localhost:9200/_stats/' 

but I couldn't find a way of filter them so that this list would only include only indexes witch match "my_index_nr_1*" where "*" would be a wild card

Solution

After using ES for quite a while here is what I use now, hope it will help someone else:

curl -XGET '/_cat/indices/my_index_nr_1*' 

You can also add ?v at the end which will give you headers of each column in result.

Answer 1

There is a neat trick using the _aliases command that when combined with a wildcard (my_index_nr_1* below) will only show you matching index names and associated indexes:

curl -XGET 'http://localhost:9200/my_index_nr_1*/_aliases?pretty' 

The result I get is:

{   "my_index_nr_1_test" : {     "aliases" : { }   } } 

Very helpful when you have a lot of indexes on a cluster but don't want to see all the other stats information.

Answer 2

For humans, the best answer is the modified summary:

curl -XGET localhost:9200/_cat/indices/my_index_nr_1*?v 

For machines, the best answer is likely a variation of (?pretty is there for you to see its output):

curl -XGET localhost:9200/my_index_nr_1*/_settings?pretty 

This will get the list of all indices that match, with their settings. The _aliases answer above is just a variation of this request. You can even trim the request down to:

curl -XGET localhost:9200/my_index_nr_1*?pretty 

However, this will respond with both the settings, aliases, and mappings of each index.