WARNING: The 2.x versions of Elasticsearch have passed their EOL dates. If you are running a 2.x version, we strongly advise you to upgrade.
This documentation is no longer maintained and may be removed. For the latest information, see the current Elasticsearch documentation.
Deleting a Documentedit
The syntax for deleting a document follows the same pattern that we have seen
already, but uses the DELETE method :
DELETE /website/blog/123
If the document is found, Elasticsearch will return an HTTP response code
of 200 OK and a response body like the following. Note that the _version
number has been incremented:
{
"found" : true,
"_index" : "website",
"_type" : "blog",
"_id" : "123",
"_version" : 3
}
If the document isn’t found, we get a 404 Not Found response code and
a body like this:
{
"found" : false,
"_index" : "website",
"_type" : "blog",
"_id" : "123",
"_version" : 4
}
Even though the document doesn’t exist (found is false), the
_version number has still been incremented. This is part of the internal
bookkeeping, which ensures that changes are applied in the correct order
across multiple nodes.
As already mentioned in Updating a Whole Document, deleting a document doesn’t immediately remove the document from disk; it just marks it as deleted. Elasticsearch will clean up deleted documents in the background as you continue to index more data.