Deleting a document

Deleting documents in ElasticSearch is possible in two ways: using the delete call or the delete by query, which we'll see in the next chapter.

Getting ready

You need a working ElasticSearch cluster and the indexed document which we have discussed in the Indexing a document recipe.

How to do it...

The REST API URL is similar to that of GET calls, but the HTTP method is DELETE:

http://<server>/<index_name>/<type_name>/<id>

For deleting a document, we need to perform the following steps:

1. If we consider the order indexed in the Indexing a document recipe, the call to delete a document will be as follows:

   curl -XDELETE 'http://localhost:9200/myindex/order/2qLrAfPVQvCRMe7Ku8r0Tw'
   

2. The result returned by ElasticSearch will be as follows:

   {
       "_id": "2qLrAfPVQvCRMe7Ku8r0Tw",
       "_index": "myindex",
       "_type": "order",
       "_version": 2,
       "found": true,
       "ok": true
   }

   The result, a part of the well-known parameter starting from _ returns the ok status...