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Index Settings

There are many many knobs that you can twiddle to customize index behaviour, which you can read about in the {ref}/index-modules.html[Index Modules reference documentation], but…​

Tip
 Elasticsearch comes with good defaults. Don’t twiddle these knobs until you understand what they do and why you should change them.

Two of the most important settings are:

number_of_shards

The number of primary shards that an index should have, which defaults to 5. This setting cannot be changed after index creation.

number_of_replicas

The number of replica shards (copies) that each primary shard should have, which defaults to 1. This setting can be changed at any time on a live index.

For instance, we could create a small index — just one primary shard — and no replica shards with the following request:

PUT /my_temp_index
{
    "settings": {
        "number_of_shards" :   1,
        "number_of_replicas" : 0
    }
}

Later, we can change the number of replica shards dynamically using the update-index-settings API as follows:

PUT /my_temp_index/_settings
{
    "number_of_replicas": 1
}