The update by query API allows all documents that with the query to be updated with a script. This is experimental.

This plugin is an adaptation of elasticsearch/elasticsearch#2230, see @martijnvg's branch.

• v2.0.0 dropped the support of the added context variables, see the corresponding section.

Simply run at the root of your ElasticSearch v0.20.2+ installation:

bin/plugin -install com.yakaz.elasticsearch.plugins/elasticsearch-action-updatebyquery/2.5.1

This will download the plugin from the Central Maven Repository.

For older versions of ElasticSearch, you can still use the longer:

bin/plugin -url http://oss.sonatype.org/content/repositories/releases/com/yakaz/elasticsearch/plugins/elasticsearch-action-updatebyquery/1.0.0/elasticsearch-action-updatebyquery-1.0.0.zip install elasticsearch-action-updatebyquery

In order to declare this plugin as a dependency, add the following to your pom.xml:

<dependency>
    <groupId>com.yakaz.elasticsearch.plugins</groupId>
    <artifactId>elasticsearch-action-updatebyquery</artifactId>
    <version>2.5.1</version>
</dependency>

Version matrix:

┌───────────────────────────────┬────────────────────────┐
│ Update By Query Action Plugin │ ElasticSearch          │
├───────────────────────────────┼────────────────────────┤
│ 2.5.x                         │ 1.5.0 ─► (1.5.2)       │
├───────────────────────────────┼────────────────────────┤
│ 2.4.0                         │ 1.4.0 ─► (1.4.5)       │
├───────────────────────────────┼────────────────────────┤
│ 2.3.0                         │ 1.4.0.Beta1            │
├───────────────────────────────┼────────────────────────┤
│ 2.2.0                         │ 1.3.0 ─► (1.3.8)       │
├───────────────────────────────┼────────────────────────┤
│ 2.1.1                         │ 1.2.3                  │
├───────────────────────────────┼────────────────────────┤
│ 2.1.0                         │ 1.2.0 ─► 1.2.2         │
├───────────────────────────────┼────────────────────────┤
│ 2.0.x                         │ 1.1.0 ─► 1.1.2         │
├───────────────────────────────┼────────────────────────┤
│ 1.6.x                         │ 1.0.0 ─► 1.0.2         │
├───────────────────────────────┼────────────────────────┤
│ 1.5.x                         │ 1.0.0.Beta1            │
├───────────────────────────────┼────────────────────────┤
│ 1.4.x                         │ 0.90.10 ─► (0.90.13)   │
├───────────────────────────────┼────────────────────────┤
│ 1.4.0                         │ 0.90.6 ─► 0.90.9       │
├───────────────────────────────┼────────────────────────┤
│ 1.3.x                         │ 0.90.4 ─► 0.90.5       │
├───────────────────────────────┼────────────────────────┤
│ 1.2.x                         │ 0.90.3                 │
├───────────────────────────────┼────────────────────────┤
│ 1.1.x                         │ 0.90.0.beta1 ─► 0.90.2 │
├───────────────────────────────┼────────────────────────┤
│ 1.0.x                         │ 0.20.0 ─► 0.20.4       │
└───────────────────────────────┴────────────────────────┘

The update by query API allows all documents that with the query to be updated with a script. This feature is experimental.

The update by query works a bit different than the delete by query. The update by query api translates the documents that match into bulk index / delete requests. After the bulk limit has been reached, the bulk requests created thus far will be executed. After the bulk requests have been executed the next batch of requests will be prepared and executed. This behavior continues until all documents that matched the query have been processed.

Note: The following example uses dynamic scripts, disabled by default since ElasticSearch 1.2.0. To enable them, add script.disable_dynamic: false to your elasticsearch configuration.

Index an example document:

curl -XPUT 'localhost:9200/twitter/tweet/1' -d '
{
    "text" : {
        "message" : "you know for search"
    },
    "likes": 0
}'

Execute the following update by query command:

curl -XPOST 'localhost:9200/twitter/_update_by_query' -d '
{
    "query" : {
        "term" : {
            "message" : "you"
        }
    },
    "script" : "ctx._source.likes += 1"
}'

This will yield the following response:

{
  "ok" : true,
  "took" : 9,
  "total" : 1,
  "updated" : 1,
  "indices" : [ {
    "twitter" : { }
  } ]
}

By default no bulk item responses are included in the response. If there are bulk item responses included in the response, the bulk response items are grouped by index and shard. This can be controlled by the response option.

• query: The query that the documents must match to be updated.
• script: The inline script source.
• script_file: The file script name.
• script_id: The indexed script id.
• lang: The script language.
• params: The script parameters.

• replication: The replication type for the delete/index operation (sync or async).
• consistency: The write consistency of the index/delete operation.
• response: What bulk response items to include into the update by query response. This can be set to the following: none, failed and all. Defaults to none. Warning: all can result in out of memory errors when the query results in many hits.
• routing: Sets the routing that will be used to route the document to the relevant shard.
• timeout: Timeout waiting for a shard to become available.

• action.updatebyquery.bulk_size: The number of documents per update bulk. Defaults to 1000.
• threadpool.bulk.queue_size: This plugins files bulk requests to perform the actual updates. You may decide to increase this value over its default of 50 if you are experiencing the following errors: EsRejectedExecutionException[rejected execution (queue capacity 50) on org.elasticsearch.action.updatebyquery.TransportShardUpdateByQueryAction$1]

NOTE: v2.0.0 of this plugin dropped the support of additional context variables in favor of a unified code path with the Update API. Pull request elasticsearch/elasticsearch#5724 aims at restoring them (except _uid). As such, the context variables available through the update by query feature are the same as those available in the Update API scripts.

Just like in the Update API, the script has access to the following variables (as of Elasticsearch 1.1.0):

• ctx
  • _source

And as of Elasticsearch 1.5.0:

• ctx
  • _source
  • _index
  • _type
  • _id
  • _version
  • _routing
  • _parent
  • _timestamp
  • _ttl

Just like in the Update API, you may update the following variables (as of Elasticsearch 1.1.0):

• ctx
  • _timestamp
  • _ttl