Bulk index or delete documents

Perform multiple index, create, delete, and update actions in a single request. This reduces overhead and can greatly increase indexing speed.

If the Elasticsearch security features are enabled, you must have the following index privileges for the target data stream, index, or index alias:

• To use the create action, you must have the create_doc, create, index, or write index privilege. Data streams support only the create action.
• To use the index action, you must have the create, index, or write index privilege.
• To use the delete action, you must have the delete or write index privilege.
• To use the update action, you must have the index or write index privilege.
• To automatically create a data stream or index with a bulk API request, you must have the auto_configure, create_index, or manage index privilege.
• To make the result of a bulk operation visible to search using the refresh parameter, you must have the maintenance or manage index privilege.

Automatic data stream creation requires a matching index template with data stream enabled.

The actions are specified in the request body using a newline delimited JSON (NDJSON) structure:

action_and_meta_data\n
optional_source\n
action_and_meta_data\n
optional_source\n
....
action_and_meta_data\n
optional_source\n
		

The index and create actions expect a source on the next line and have the same semantics as the op_type parameter in the standard index API. A create action fails if a document with the same ID already exists in the target An index action adds or replaces a document as necessary.

An update action expects that the partial doc, upsert, and script and its options are specified on the next line.

A delete action does not expect a source on the next line and has the same semantics as the standard delete API.

If you provide a target in the request path, it is used for any actions that don't explicitly specify an _index argument.

A note on the format: the idea here is to make processing as fast as possible. As some of the actions are redirected to other shards on other nodes, only action_meta_data is parsed on the receiving node side.

Client libraries using this protocol should try and strive to do something similar on the client side, and reduce buffering as much as possible.

There is no "correct" number of actions to perform in a single bulk request. Experiment with different settings to find the optimal size for your particular workload. Note that Elasticsearch limits the maximum size of a HTTP request to 100mb by default so clients must ensure that no request exceeds this size. It is not possible to index a single document that exceeds the size limit, so you must pre-process any such documents into smaller pieces before sending them to Elasticsearch. For instance, split documents into pages or chapters before indexing them, or store raw binary data in a system outside Elasticsearch and replace the raw data with a link to the external system in the documents that you send to Elasticsearch.

Client suppport for bulk requests

Some of the officially supported clients provide helpers to assist with bulk requests and reindexing:

• Go: Check out esutil.BulkIndexer
• Perl: Check out Search::Elasticsearch::Client::5_0::Bulk and Search::Elasticsearch::Client::5_0::Scroll
• Python: Check out elasticsearch.helpers.*
• JavaScript: Check out client.helpers.*
• Java: Check out co.elastic.clients.elasticsearch._helpers.bulk.BulkIngester
• .NET: Check out BulkAllObservable
• PHP: Check out bulk indexing.
• Ruby: Check out Elasticsearch::Helpers::BulkHelper

Submitting bulk requests with cURL

If you're providing text file input to curl, you must use the --data-binary flag instead of plain -d. The latter doesn't preserve newlines. For example:

$ cat requests
{ "index" : { "_index" : "test", "_id" : "1" } }
{ "field1" : "value1" }
$ curl -s -H "Content-Type: application/x-ndjson" -XPOST localhost:9200/_bulk --data-binary "@requests"; echo
{"took":7, "errors": false, "items":[{"index":{"_index":"test","_id":"1","_version":1,"result":"created","forced_refresh":false}}]}
		

Optimistic concurrency control

Each index and delete action within a bulk API call may include the if_seq_no and if_primary_term parameters in their respective action and meta data lines. The if_seq_no and if_primary_term parameters control how operations are run, based on the last modification to existing documents. See Optimistic concurrency control for more details.

Versioning

Each bulk item can include the version value using the version field. It automatically follows the behavior of the index or delete operation based on the _version mapping. It also support the version_type.

Routing

Each bulk item can include the routing value using the routing field. It automatically follows the behavior of the index or delete operation based on the _routing mapping.

Refresh

Control when the changes made by this request are visible to search.

You might want to disable the refresh interval temporarily to improve indexing throughput for large bulk requests. Refer to the linked documentation for step-by-step instructions using the index settings API.