Elasticsearch document ttl not working

Question

I am following the examples given in the documentation to add ttl for documents in elasticsearch: http://www.elasticsearch.org/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/current/docs-index_.html#index-ttl

Using the Sense tool on Chrome, I tried the following and expecting the documents to dissappear in 5 seconds:

PUT /twitter/tweets/2
{
    "_ttl" : "5000",
    "user" : "Romonov",
    "TestField" : "TestData2"
}

PUT /twitters/tweetsy/1?ttl=5000
{
    "user" : "Romonov",
    "TestField" : "TestData1"
}

None of the above are working and the documents are still visible after 5 seconds. I have also tried to set enable _ttl before creating any documents on that index:

PUT /twig/twigsy/_mapping?pretty
{
    "user" : {"_ttl": {"enabled": true}}
}

where, I havent yet PUT any documents on the index twig. But this comes back with an error:

{
   "error": "IndexMissingException[[twig] missing]",
   "status": 404
}

I tried the same with curl(installed it on my windows machine) but getting the same error:

C:\WINDOWS\system32>curl -XPUT "http://localhost:9200/facebook/fb/_mapping?pretty" -d "{ "user" : {"_ttl": {"enabled": true}}"
{
  "error" : "IndexMissingException[[facebook] missing]",
  "status" : 404
}

Wondering what I am missing.

Answer 1

I could get it to work by doing two things:
1. Add this line in elasticsearch.yml file:

indices.ttl.interval: 7d

2. Create a default-mapping.json document in the same location as elasticsearch.yml with the following lines:

{
    _default_ : { 
        "_ttl" : { 
            "enabled" : true, "default" : "7d" 
            }
        }
}

All new clusters created after doing these two things have ttl enabled to be 7days. In my observation till now it applies to all indices created on these new clusters.