Delete By Query Pluginedit

The delete-by-query plugin adds support for deleting all of the documents (from one or more indices) which match the specified query. It is a replacement for the problematic delete-by-query functionality which has been removed from Elasticsearch core.

Internally, it uses Scroll and Bulk APIs to delete documents in an efficient and safe manner. It is slower than the old delete-by-query functionality, but fixes the problems with the previous implementation.

To understand more about why we removed delete-by-query from core and about the semantics of the new implementation, see Why Delete-By-Query is a plugin.

Queries which match large numbers of documents may run for a long time, as every document has to be deleted individually. Don’t use delete-by-query to clean out all or most documents in an index. Rather create a new index and perhaps reindex the documents you want to keep.

Installationedit

This plugin can be installed using the plugin manager:

sudo bin/plugin install delete-by-query

The plugin must be installed on every node in the cluster, and each node must be restarted after installation.

Removaledit

The plugin can be removed with the following command:

sudo bin/plugin remove delete-by-query

The node must be stopped before removing the plugin.