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I'm new to elasticsearch and am still trying to set it up. I have installed elasticsearch 5.5.1 using default values I have also installed Kibana 5.5.1 using the default values. I've also installed the ingest-attachment plugin with the latest x-pack plugin. I have elasticsearch running as a service and I have Kibana open in my browser. On the Kibana dashboardI have an error stating that it is unable to fetch mappings. I guess this is because I havn't set up any indices or pipelines yet. This is where I need some steer, all the documentation I've found so far on-line isn't particularly clear. I have a directory with a mixture of document types such as pdf and doc files. My ultimate goal is to be able to search these documents with values that a user will enter via an app. I'm guessing I need to use the Dev Tools/console window in Kibana using the 'PUT' command to create a pipeline next, but I'm unsure of how I should do this so that it points to my directory with the documents. Can anybody provide me an example of this for this version please.

bilpor
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If I understand you correctly, let's first set some basic understanding about elasticsearch:

  • Elasticsearch in it's simple definition is a "Search engine". so you need to store some data, and then elastic will help you to search using a search criteria, and it will retrieve relevant data back
  • You need a "Container" to save your data to, and elastic has this thing like any database engine to store your data, but the terms are somehow different. for example a "Database" in sql-like systems is called "Index", and what you know as "table" is called "Type" in elastic.
  • from my understanding, you will need to create your index (with or without mappings) to have a starting point, and I recommend you to start without mappings just to "start" and get things working, but later on it's highly recommend to work with "mappings" if applicable, because elastic is smart, but it cannot know more about your data than you do
  • Because Kibana has failed to find a proper index to start with, it has complained and asked you to either provide a syntax for index names, or a specific index name so it can infer the inline mappings and give you the nice features of querying, displaying charts, etc of your data, so once you create your index, you will provide that to the starting page of Kibana, and you will be ready to go.

Let me know if you need something more specific to your needs :)

Mohammed Swillam
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  • Thanks, I'm taking the example for creating an index from [create index](https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/current/indices-create-index.html), but in the Kibana Console, when I type `index` it only gives options for `term_index_divisor` or `term_index_interval` not plain `index` as per the example. – bilpor Aug 01 '17 at 13:33
  • According to the Readme doc that comes with Elasticsearch If I was using XPUT (curl) against my elastic address the index will be created automatically. So I've 2 problems here. First I don't want to place all the documents under my wwwroot folder and second I have thousands of documents I don't really want to be creating a single line entry for every document. There must be a better way to create the Index than the example – bilpor Aug 01 '17 at 13:55
  • I continued on anyway i.e. In the kibana Console I have now created an index, this has got rid of the initial error now, but how do I point this index to my directory of documents? – bilpor Aug 01 '17 at 14:40