How to update elasticsearch field type

Question

I need to update elasticsearch field type integer to long I tried the following way and it not works

curl -XPUT 'http://localhost:9200/testwork/_mapping/message?ignore_conflicts=true' -d '
{
    "message" : {
        "properties" : {
            "status" : {"type" : "long"}
        }
    }
}
'

When tried without ignore_conflicts parameter it getting error like

{"error":"MergeMappingException[Merge failed with failures {[mapper [status] of different type, current_type [integer], merged_type [long]]}]","status":400}

But not get error while using ignore_conflicts parameter got the response like

{"acknowledged":true} 

But the type not changed for status field. Please help me to do this

Answer 1

It is not possible to change the data type if you have data present.

You'll have to delete your index, create the mapping with the data type you want, and re-index your data.

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To re-index you will need to export and re-import your data - there are some tools (scan&scroll and bulk API) to make this easier, see reindexing your data.

An alternative is to create a new index and then use aliasing - i.e. when doing an insert write to the latest index (could use an alias with a single index in it), but when doing a query, read from an alias that includes all relevant indexes (new and old versions of the index).