elasticsearch for beginners part 1: how to create a document

In this Elasticsearch for beginners series, I will give you basics of Elasticsearch with real world examples. The first part is for teaching you how to create -that is index- a document in Elasticsearch.

I assume you managed to download the latest Elasticsearch zip to your local, extracted it and after that installed the marvel plugin and started a new node by running "elasticsearch" under your installation's bin directory.

Now it is time for some action. We can choose to give custom id to our document or leave it to Elasticsearch so we won't bother by generating a new one.

You can choose whatever content you want, but for keeping it simple I'll consider the usual user example. Our user will have a  username, first name, last name and a contact phone.

 {
   "username" : "kimchy",
   "fist_name" : "kimchy",
   "last_name" : "aloevera",
   "phone" : "00905332446578"
 }

Now lets open our Sense plugin. Go to "http://localhost:9200/_plugin/marvel/sense/index.html" after your node is up and running.

Before indexing anything I'll tell you that we will need an index and a type information.
Index is like a database and type is like a table if we use  RDBMS analogies.

Please don't get confused over the meaning of index. Indexing a document is creating a document, index information of a document is its database.

Lets insert our first document with custom id. We will use "elastic_101" as index and "user" as type.

PUT /elastic_101/user/1
 {
   "username" : "kimchy",
   "fist_name" : "kimchy",
   "last_name" : "aloevera",
   "phone" : "00905332446578"
 }

We can check if we are successful in indexing it.

The result to the following query

GET elastic_101/user/_search

is

{
   "took": 16,
   "timed_out": false,
   "_shards": {
      "total": 5,
      "successful": 5,
      "failed": 0
   },
   "hits": {
      "total": 1,
      "max_score": 1,
      "hits": [
         {
            "_index": "elastic_101",
            "_type": "user",
            "_id": "1",
            "_score": 1,
            "_source": {
               "username": "kimchy",
               "fist_name": "kimchy",
               "last_name": "aloevera",
               "phone": "00905332446578"
            }
         }
      ]
   }
}

Now lets index a new document with autogenerated id.

POST /elastic_101/user/
 {
   "username" : "sezinkarli",
   "fist_name" : "sezin",
   "last_name" : "karli",
   "phone" : "00905322426528"
 }

Again let me check the result with

GET elastic_101/user/_search

Result is:

 
{
   "took": 40,
   "timed_out": false,
   "_shards": {
      "total": 5,
      "successful": 5,
      "failed": 0
   },
   "hits": {
      "total": 2,
      "max_score": 1,
      "hits": [
         {
            "_index": "elastic_101",
            "_type": "user",
            "_id": "AVAFxb36kyTg7_oSOIVN",
            "_score": 1,
            "_source": {
               "username": "sezinkarli",
               "fist_name": "sezin",
               "last_name": "karli",
               "phone": "00905322426528"
            }
         },
         {
            "_index": "elastic_101",
            "_type": "user",
            "_id": "1",
            "_score": 1,
            "_source": {
               "username": "kimchy",
               "fist_name": "kimchy",
               "last_name": "aloevera",
               "phone": "00905332446578"
            }
         }
      ]
   }
}

As you can see both users have a username, first name, last name and a phone. Notice that if for kimchy is 1 which is the one we gave it and the other id is "AVAFxb36kyTg7_oSOIVN" which is generated by Elasticsearch.

In this part of my Elasticsearch tutorial, we learnt how to create documents with custom or auto-generated id. You can have more in depth information in my Elasticsearch in Action course and this link will make a discount of 60%.