How do you perform CRUD operations on documents?

You perform CRUD on Elasticsearch documents with the document APIs. Each operation is one HTTP request to a path made of the index name and the document ID.

To create a document, or replace it if the ID exists, send PUT with the JSON body. This is called indexing a document.

PUT /users/_doc/1
{
  "name": "John Doe",
  "email": "john@example.com",
  "age": 30
}

To read it, send GET to the same path.

GET /users/_doc/1

To change only some fields, use the update API. It merges the partial doc into the stored document.

POST /users/_update/1
{
  "doc": {
    "age": 31
  }
}

To delete it, send DELETE to the same path.

DELETE /users/_doc/1

For many documents, the bulk API sends many operations in one request. The body is newline-delimited JSON, with an action line before each document. Bulk requests are much faster than one request per document, which matters for large loads.

POST /_bulk
{"index": {"_index": "users", "_id": "1"}}
{"name": "Alice", "age": 25}
{"index": {"_index": "users", "_id": "2"}}
{"name": "Bob", "age": 30}