Introduction

Elasticsearch provides a comprehensive documentation on index maintenance. A good article on that topic can be found on https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/guide/current/retiring-data.html .

In order to perform these maintenance tasks on a regular basis, I created a tool that interacts with the elasticsearch server in order to perform index maintenance. Currently only the REST API is supported.

Configuration

After building using the 'mvn package' command, a jar and a sample config.yaml file is created. Edit the config.yaml file according to your needs and set the following variables:

• protocol the protocol (currently only http is supported)
• hostname the hostname of the elasticsearch server
• port the port of the elasticsearch server
• maxAgeToDelete the number of days when an index can be deleted
• maxAgeToArchive the number of days when an index can be archived
• maxAgeToOptimize the number of days when an index shall be optimized (a good startingpoint is to optimize indices after 1 day)
• dateFormat the date pattern of your timestamps (e.g. yyyy.MM.dd)
• indexpattern - a list of indices to maintain

Running

In order to run the tool just execute java -jar elasticsearch-index-cleaner-0.0.1-SNAPSHOT.jar. A log file cleaner.log is created and gives further details on the execution of the tool.