How to do it...

As we are changing the state of the data, the HTTP method is POST and the REST URL is as follows:

http://<server>/<index_name/_bulk

To execute a bulk action, we will perform the following steps via curl (because it's very common to prepare your data on files and send them to Elasticsearch via the command line):

1. We need to collect the create/index/delete/update commands in a structure made of bulk JSON lines, composed of a line of action with metadata, and another optional line of data related to the action. Every line must end with a new line \n. A bulk data file should be presented like this:

{ "index":{ "_index":"myindex", "_id":"1" } }
{ "field1" : "value1", "field2" : "value2" }
{ "delete":{ "_index":"myindex", "_id":"2" } }
{ "create":{ "_index":"myindex", "_id":"3" } }
{ "field1" : "value1", "field2" : "value2" }
{ "update":{ "_index":"myindex", "_id":"3" } }
{ "doc":{"field1" : "value1", "field2" : "value2" }}

1. This file can be sent with the following POST:

curl -s -XPOST localhost:9200/_bulk --data-binary @bulkdata;

1. The result returned by Elasticsearch should collect all the responses of the actions.

You can execute the previous commands in Kibana with the following call:

POST /_bulk
{ "index":{ "_index":"myindex", "_id":"1" } }
{ "field1" : "value1", "field2" : "value2" }
{ "delete":{ "_index":"myindex", "_id":"2" } }
{ "create":{ "_index":"myindex", "_id":"3" } }
{ "field1" : "value1", "field2" : "value2" }
{ "update":{ "_index":"myindex", "_id":"3" } }
{ "doc":{"field1" : "value1", "field2" : "value2" }}