Delete an Index

Now let’s delete the index that we just created and then list all the indexes again:

curl -XDELETE 'localhost:9200/customer?pretty'
curl 'localhost:9200/_cat/indices?v'

And the response:

curl -XDELETE 'localhost:9200/customer?pretty'
{
  "acknowledged" : true
}
curl 'localhost:9200/_cat/indices?v'
health index pri rep docs.count docs.deleted store.size pri.store.size

Which means that the index was deleted successfully and we are now back to where we started with nothing in our cluster.

Before we move on, let’s take a closer look again at some of the API commands that we have learned so far:

curl -XPUT 'localhost:9200/customer'
curl -XPUT 'localhost:9200/customer/external/1' -d '
{
  "name": "John Doe"
}'
curl 'localhost:9200/customer/external/1'
curl -XDELETE 'localhost:9200/customer'

If we study the above commands carefully, we can actually see a pattern of how we access data in Elasticsearch. That pattern can be summarized as follows:

curl -<REST Verb> <Node>:<Port>/<Index>/<Type>/<ID>

This REST access pattern is pervasive throughout all the API commands that if you can simply remember it, you will have a good head start at mastering Elasticsearch.