Import/Index a JSON file into Elasticsearch

Question

I am new to Elasticsearch and have been entering data manually up until this point. For example I've done something like this:

$ curl -XPUT 'http://localhost:9200/twitter/tweet/1' -d '{
    "user" : "kimchy",
    "post_date" : "2009-11-15T14:12:12",
    "message" : "trying out Elastic Search"
}'

I now have a .json file and I want to index this into Elasticsearch. I've tried something like this too, but no success:

curl -XPOST 'http://jfblouvmlxecs01:9200/test/test/1' -d lane.json

How do I import a .json file? Are there steps I need to take first to ensure the mapping is correct?

Answer 1

The right command if you want to use a file with curl is this:

curl -XPOST 'http://jfblouvmlxecs01:9200/test/_doc/1' -d @lane.json

Elasticsearch is schemaless, therefore you don't necessarily need a mapping. If you send the json as it is and you use the default mapping, every field will be indexed and analyzed using the standard analyzer.

If you want to interact with Elasticsearch through the command line, you may want to have a look at the elasticshell which should be a little bit handier than curl.

2019-07-10: Should be noted that custom mapping types is deprecated and should not be used. I updated the type in the url above to make it easier to see which was the index and which was the type as having both named "test" was confusing.