Ingest Node

You can use ingest node to pre-process documents before the actual indexing takes place. This pre-processing happens by an ingest node that intercepts bulk and index requests, applies the transformations, and then passes the documents back to the index or bulk APIs.

You can enable ingest on any node or even have dedicated ingest nodes. Ingest is enabled by default on all nodes. To disable ingest on a node, configure the following setting in the elasticsearch.yml file:

node.ingest: false

To pre-process documents before indexing, you define a pipeline that specifies a series of processors. Each processor transforms the document in some way. For example, you may have a pipeline that consists of one processor that removes a field from the document followed by another processor that renames a field. Configured pipelines are then stored in the cluster state.

To use a pipeline, you simply specify the pipeline parameter on an index or bulk request to tell the ingest node which pipeline to use. For example:

PUT my-index/my-type/my-id?pipeline=my_pipeline_id
{
  "foo": "bar"
}

See Ingest APIs for more information about creating, adding, and deleting pipelines.