Another different way to achieve the renaming or change the mappings for an index is to reindex using logstash. Here is a sample of the logstash 2.1 configuration:
input {
elasticsearch {
hosts => ["es01.example.com", "es02.example.com"]
index => "old-index-name"
size => 500
scroll => "5m"
}
}
filter {
mutate {
remove_field => [ "@version" ]
}
date {
"match" => [ "custom_timestamp", "MM/dd/YYYY HH:mm:ss" ]
target => "@timestamp"
}
}
output {
elasticsearch {
hosts => ["es01.example.com", "es02.example.com" ]
manage_template => false
index => "new-index-name"
}
}