Elasticsearch Template

Opster Team

Last updated: May 8, 2022

| 1 min read

In addition to reading this guide, we recommend you run the Elasticsearch Health Check-Up. It will detect issues and improve your Elasticsearch performance by analyzing your shard sizes, threadpools, memory, snapshots, disk watermarks and more.

The Elasticsearch Check-Up is free and requires no installation.

In addition to reading this guide and learning how to create search and dynamic index templates, we recommend you run the Template Optimizer. The Template Optimizer will help you optimize your Elasticsearch templates to improve your cluster’s configuration and performance.

Overview

A template in Elasticsearch falls into one of the two following categories and is indexed inside Elasticsearch using its dedicated endpoint: 

  1. Index templates, which are a way to define a set of rules including index settings, mappings and an index pattern. The template is applied automatically whenever a new index is created with the matching pattern. Templates are also used to dynamically apply custom mapping for the fields which are not predefined inside existing mapping.
  2. Search templates, which help in defining templates for search queries using mustache scripting language. These templates act as a placeholder for variables defined inside the search queries.

Examples

Create a dynamic index template

PUT /_template/template_1?pretty
{
  "index_patterns": [
    "logs*",
    "api*"
  ],
  "settings": {
    "number_of_shards": 2
  },
  "mappings": {
    "dynamic_templates": [
      {
        "strings": {
          "match_mapping_type": "string",
          "mapping": {
            "type": "keyword"
          }
        }
      }
    ],
    "properties": {
      "host_name": {
        "type": "keyword"
      },
      "created_at": {
        "type": "date"
      }
    }
  }
}

Create a search template

POST /_scripts/search_template_1?pretty
{
    "script": {
        "lang": "mustache",
        "source": {
            "query": {
                "match": {
                    "description": "{{query_string}}"
                }
            }
        }
    }
}

Executing a search query using search template

GET /_search/template?pretty
{
    "id": "search_template_1", 
    "params": {
        "query_string": "hello world"
    }
}

The search request will be executed by default on all the indices available in the cluster and can be limited to particular indices using an index parameter.

Notes

  • A dynamic index template is always useful when you do not know the field names in advance and want to control their mapping as per the business use case.

Related log errors to this ES concept


Error updating template
Error deleting template ; request was not acknowledged
Starting template upgrade to version ; templates will be updated and will be removed
Error adding watcher template ; request was not acknowledged
Templates are still reported as out of date after the upgrade. The template upgrade will be retried.
Could not execute query template (failed to close writer)
Could not execute query template (failed to flush writer)
Failed to read template from config
Error adding index template for . request was not acknowledged
Error adding index template from for
Error adding lifecycle policy for
Error adding lifecycle policy for . request was not acknowledged

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