Connect to Elasticsearch

If you are looking for a user interface for Elasticsearch and your data, head on over to Kibana! Not only are there amazing visualization and index management tools, Kibana includes a realistic sample data set to play with so that you can get to know what you could do with your data.

There are two ways to connect directly to your Elasticsearch cluster: Through the RESTful API or through the Java transport client. Both ways use an endpoint URL that includes a port, such as https://ec47fc4d2c53414e1307e85726d4b9bb.us-east-1.aws.found.io:9243.

The simplest way to connect to your cluster:

Used with the curl command and most programming languages that aren’t Java, the RESTful API is a very popular way to interact with your Elasticsearch cluster. When you clicked an endpoint URL in the Cloud UI, you were already using the RESTful API.

To interact with your cluster through the API, use your Elasticsearch cluster endpoint information from the Overview page in the Cloud UI. Endpoint URLs look like https://ec47fc4d2c53414e1307e85726d4b9bb.us-east-1.aws.found.io:9243 (AWS) or like https://d8d6bc6fcb4f7ca37640851dadac668a.us-central1.gcp.cloud.es.io:9243 (GCP) and can tell you quite a bit about your cluster. The format is always:

https://CLUSTER_ID.REGION.CLOUD_PLATFORM.DOMAIN:PORT

If you created a cluster on Elasticsearch 5.0 or later or if you already enabled the security features with an earlier version of Elasticsearch, you must include authentication details with the -u parameter when you interact with your cluster.

If this is your first time using Elasticsearch, you can try out some curl commands to become familiar with the basics of indexing or searching documents. On operating systems like macOS or Linux, you should already have the curl command installed.

To index your first document into an index called my_index in Elasticsearch, issue a POST request and include the document in JSON format:

curl -u elastic:password https://CLUSTER_ID.REGION.PLATFORM.found.io:9243/my_index/my_type -XPOST -d '{
"title": "One", "tags": ["ruby"]
}'
{"_index":"my_index","_type":"my_type","_id":"AV3ZeXsOMOVbmlCACuwj","_version":1,"result":"created","_shards":{"total":2,"successful":1,"failed":0},"created":true}

To retrieve all the documents in the same index, issue a GET request:

curl -u elastic:password https://CLUSTER_ID.REGION.PLATFORM.found.io:9243/my_index/my_type/_search?pretty=true
{
  "took" : 0,
  "timed_out" : false,
  "_shards" : {
    "total" : 5,
    "successful" : 5,
    "failed" : 0
  },
  "hits" : {
    "total" : 1,
    "max_score" : 1.0,
    "hits" : [
      {
        "_index" : "my_index",
        "_type" : "my_type",
        "_id" : "AV3ZeXsOMOVbmlCACuwj",
        "_score" : 1.0,
        "_source" : {
          "title" : "One",
          "tags" : [
            "ruby"
          ]
        }
      }
    ]
  }
}

These examples barely scratch the surface of what’s available. Once you experiment with slightly bigger queries, you might also want to try something that is a little more syntax aware. Some popular choices are:

A good choice if your applications are using Java. This lighter-weight transport client forwards requests to a remote cluster over your endpoint URL and port 9343 with TLS/SSL using the native Elasticsearch transport protocol (port 9300 without encryption is also supported but not recommended).