The counterpart of creating an index is deleting one. Deleting an index means deleting its shards, mappings, and data. There are many common scenarios when we need to delete an index, such as:
Removing the index to clean unwanted/obsolete data (for example, old Logstash indices).
Resetting an index for a scratch restart.
Deleting an index that has some missing shards, mainly due to some failures, to bring the cluster back in a valid state. (If a node dies and it's storing a single replica shard of an index, this index is missing a shard so the cluster state becomes red. In this case, you'll bring back the cluster to a green status, but you lose the data contained in the deleted index.)
You need an up-and-running Elasticsearch installation, as used in the Downloading and installing Elasticsearch recipe in Chapter 2, Downloading and Setup.
To execute curl via the command line, you need to install curl for your operative system.
The index created in the previous recipe...
