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This documentation is no longer maintained and may be removed.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.
Checking Whether a Document Existsedit
If all you want to do is to check whether a document exists—you’re not
interested in the content at all—then use the HEAD method instead
of the GET method. HEAD requests don’t return a body, just HTTP headers:
curl -i -XHEAD http://localhost:9200/website/blog/123
Elasticsearch will return a 200 OK status code if the document exists:
HTTP/1.1 200 OK Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8 Content-Length: 0
And a 404 Not Found if it doesn’t exist:
curl -i -XHEAD http://localhost:9200/website/blog/124
HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8 Content-Length: 0
Of course, just because a document didn’t exist when you checked it, doesn’t mean that it won’t exist a millisecond later: another process might create the document in the meantime.