Why doesn't routing work with ElasticSearch Bulk API?

Question

I am setting a Bulk request to ElasticSearch and specifying the shard to route to.

But when I run it, the documents get sent to different shards.

Is this a bug in ElasticSEarch bulk? it works when I just index a single document. It works when I search. But not when I do a bulk import.

To reproduce:

curl -XPOST 'http://192.168.1.115:9200/_bulk?routing=a' -d '
{ "index" : { "_index" : "articles", "_type" : "article", "_id" : "1" } }
{ "title" : "value1" }
{ "delete" : { "_index" : "articles", "_type" : "article", "_id" : "2" } }
{ "create" : { "_index" : "articles", "_type" : "article", "_id" : "3" } }
{ "title" : "value3" }
{ "update" : {"_id" : "1", "_type" : "article", "_index" : "index1"} }
{ "doc" : {"field2" : "value2"} }'

Answer 1

So adding the "routing" parameter to the end of the URL doesn't work.

I need to add the "_routing" field to the actual document fields to specify which shard it will go to.

Very unintuitive, and I wish ElasticSearch would've documented this! Sometimes I wish I just chose Solr :*(

Hope this helps anyone else looking for this in the future

curl -XPOST 'http://192.168.1.115:9200/_bulk?routing=a' -d '
{ "index" : { "_index" : "articles", "_type" : "article", "_id" : "1", "_routing" : "b"} }
{ "title" : "value1" }
{ "delete" : { "_index" : "articles", "_type" : "article", "_id" : "2", "_routing" : "b" } }
{ "create" : { "_index" : "articles", "_type" : "article", "_id" : "3", "_routing" : "b" } }
{ "title" : "value3" }
{ "update" : {"_id" : "1", "_type" : "article", "_index" : "index1", "_routing" : "b"} }
{ "doc" : {"field2" : "value2"} }'