Elasticsearch query to return all records

Question

I have a small database in Elasticsearch and for testing purposes would like to pull all records back. I am attempting to use a URL of the form...

http://localhost:9200/foo/_search?pretty=true&q={'matchAll':{''}}

Can someone give me the URL you would use to accomplish this, please?

Answer 1

I think lucene syntax is supported so:

http://localhost:9200/foo/_search?pretty=true&q=*:*

size defaults to 10, so you may also need &size=BIGNUMBER to get more than 10 items. (where BIGNUMBER equals a number you believe is bigger than your dataset)

BUT, elasticsearch documentation suggests for large result sets, using the scan search type.

EG:

curl -XGET 'localhost:9200/foo/_search?search_type=scan&scroll=10m&size=50' -d '
{
    "query" : {
        "match_all" : {}
    }
}'

and then keep requesting as per the documentation link above suggests.

EDIT: scan Deprecated in 2.1.0.

scan does not provide any benefits over a regular scroll request sorted by _doc. link to elastic docs (spotted by @christophe-roussy)