How to update a field type in elasticsearch

Question

The ElasticSearch documents just aren't clear on how to do this.

I indexed some tweets, and one of the fields, created_at, indexed as a string instead of a date. I can't find how to reindex with this change via a curl call. If reindexing is a complicated process, then I would much rather just delete what's there and start over. But, I can't find how to specify the field types either!

Any help is greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

You need to define a mapping using Put Mapping API.

curl -XPUT 'http://localhost:9200/twitter/_doc/_mapping' -H 'Content-Type: application/json'  -d '
{
    "_doc" : {
        "properties" : {
            "message" : {"type" : "text", "store" : true}
        }
    }
}
'

A date can be defined as follow:

curl -XPUT 'http://localhost:9200/twitter/_doc/_mapping' -H 'Content-Type: application/json'  -d '
{
    "_doc" : {
        "properties" : {
            "user" : {"type" : "keyword", "null_value" : "na"},
            "message" : {"type" : "text"},
            "postDate" : {"type" : "date"},
            "priority" : {"type" : "integer"},
            "rank" : {"type" : "float"}
        }
    }
}
'