[curl] How to insert data into elasticsearch

I am new to Elasticearch, and I have been trying for 2 days to insert some data into Elasticearch. I found on Google that there are many pages to help to create an index (I am not clear about "index", does it mean "insert" in other terms?) Then many places give some curl command, and I really don't know where to execute these code lines to insert data. Example:

curl -XPOST "http://[localhost]:9200/indexname/typename/optionalUniqueId" -d '{ "field" : "value" }'

I am using Window 7 and I have installed Java and run elasticsearch successfully. Could anybody show me more details about how to insert data into Elasticearch

Many thanks

To test and try curl requests from Windows, you can make use of Postman client Chrome extension. It is very simple to use and quite powerful.

Or as suggested you can install the cURL util.

A sample curl request is as follows.

curl -X POST -H "Content-Type: application/json" -H "Cache-Control: no-cache" -d '{
"user" : "Arun Thundyill Saseendran",
"post_date" : "2009-03-23T12:30:00",
"message" : "trying out Elasticsearch"
}' "http://10.103.102.56:9200/sampleindex/sampletype/"

I am also getting started with and exploring ES in vast. So please let me know if you have any other doubts.

EDIT: Updated the index name and type name to be fully lowercase to avoid errors and follow convention.

To avoid using curl or Chrome plugins you can just use the the built in windows Powershell. From the Powershell command window run

Invoke-WebRequest -UseBasicParsing "http://127.0.0.1:9200/sampleindex/sampleType/" -
Method POST -ContentType "application/json" -Body '{
"user" : "Test",
"post_date" : "2017/11/13 11:07:00",
"message" : "trying out Elasticsearch"
}'

Note the Index name MUST be in lowercase.

Simple fundamentals, Elastic community has exposed indexing, searching, deleting operation as rest web service. You can interact elastic using curl or sense(chrome plugin) or any rest client like postman.

If you are just testing few commands, I would recommend can use of sense chrome plugin which has simple UI and pretty mature plugin now.

Let me explain clearly.. If you are familiar With rdbms.. Index is database.. And index type is table.. It mean index is collection of index types., like collection of tables as database (DB).

in NOSQL.. Index is database and index type is collections. Group of collection as database..

To execute those queries... U need to install CURL for Windows.

Curl is nothing but a command line rest tool.. If you want a graphical tool.. Try

Sense plugin for chrome...

Hope it helps..

I started off using curl, but since have migrated to use kibana. Here is some more information on the ELK stack from elastic.co (E elastic search, K kibana): https://www.elastic.co/elk-stack

With kibana your POST requests are a bit more simple:

POST /<INDEX_NAME>/<TYPE_NAME>
{
    "field": "value",
    "id": 1,
    "account_id": 213,
    "name": "kimchy"
}

If you are using KIBANA with elasticsearch then you can use below RESt request to create and put in the index.

CREATING INDEX:

http://localhost:9200/company
PUT company
{
  "settings": {
    "index": {
      "number_of_shards": 1,
      "number_of_replicas": 1
    },
    "analysis": {
      "analyzer": {
        "analyzer-name": {
          "type": "custom",
          "tokenizer": "keyword",
          "filter": "lowercase"
        }
      }
    }
  },
  "mappings": {
    "employee": {
      "properties": {
        "age": {
          "type": "long"
        },
        "experience": {
          "type": "long"
        },
        "name": {
          "type": "text",
          "analyzer": "analyzer-name"
        }
      }
    }
  }
}

CREATING DOCUMENT:

POST http://localhost:9200/company/employee/2/_create
{
"name": "Hemani",
"age" : 23,
"experienceInYears" : 2
}