Elasticsearch curl query: List of indices having 0 documents

Question

I am trying to get a list of all of my Elasticsearch indices that have 0 documents.

My approach was to query _cat/indices

curl -GET 'http://localhost:9200/_cat/indices' -d '{
    "query": { "match": { "docs.count": "0" } }
}'

But it does not seem to work as I see indices with more than 0 documents being listed.

Cat indices documentation can be found here: https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/1.6/cat-indices.html

Any suggestions?

Thank you.

In fact what I am trying to do is to later remove these indices from my cluster (the ones that have 0 documents). The only characteristic they have in common is their matching number of documents. Would I be able to `grep` on `docs.count` ? — halpsb, Oct 28 '15 at 19:36

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Oct 29 '15 at 01:44

1

I feel awk and cat API would be a better choice. You can use the below command to get what you are looking for -

curl -GET 'http://localhost:9200/_cat/indices' 2>/dev/null | awk ' ($6 == 0) {print $3}'

answered Oct 29 '15 at 01:44

Vineeth Mohan

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Thank you, this works well! Would there be a way to easily delete the returned elements with this method? – halpsb Oct 29 '15 at 10:12
I believe as of now , we don't have any other methods. – Vineeth Mohan Oct 29 '15 at 13:45
I tried to apply `-XDELETE` to your command in various ways but could not get it working :( Any ideas? – halpsb Oct 29 '15 at 15:26
What were you trying with DELETE – Vineeth Mohan Oct 29 '15 at 17:14

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Mar 28 '23 at 05:26

use this bash script |tee to output.txt if you want

eg

sh list.sh | tee output.sh

uncomment xdelete if you want to delete it

#!/bin/bash

# Elasticsearch URL
ES_URL="http://localhost:9200"

api_timeout=5m


# Get a list of all indices
indices=$(curl -s "${ES_URL}/_cat/indices" | awk '{print $3}')

# Loop through each index and check if it has zero documents
for index in $indices; do
  doc_count=$(curl -s "${ES_URL}/${index}/_count" | jq -r '.count')
  if [ "$doc_count" -eq 0 ]; then
    echo "${index}"
    # curl -X DELETE "${ES_URL}/${index}?master_timeout=${api_timeout}"
  fi
done

Elasticsearch curl query: List of indices having 0 documents

2 Answers2