Close index API does not seem to provide option to ignore missing indexes

Elastic Stack Elasticsearch
1

I've recently tried to use the close functionality described in:

https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/1.7/indices-open-close.html

Yet it seems that the option ignore_unavailable is not working for closing an index. I've tried:

POST /<indexname>/_close?ignore_unavailable=true

as well as (with various combinations of double quotes too)

POST /<indexname>/_close
{
    ignore_unavailable: true
}

What I'm getting in both cases is the following:

{
   "error": "RemoteTransportException[[Patsy Walker][inet[/<XXXXXXXX>:9300]][indices:admin/close]]; nested: IndexMissingException[[foo] missing]; ",
   "status": 404
}

where =foo in my case. I'm not expecting this exception to be thrown. The operation should silently complete.

I'm using version 1.7.2 of elasticsearch.
I'm wondering if this is a genuine bug or if the documentation is not up-to-date.
If someone else could check this on their installation that would be appreciated.
All you need to do is execute these queries for an index you know does not exist.

2

I take it you're using sense?

POST /indexname/_close?ignore_unavailable=true worked fine for me. The 404 seems to indicate that the index you are trying to close doesn't exists though, can you check via _cat/indices?

3

Thanks for trying the test

I know that the index does not exist. This post if all about the behaviour I would expect in the case that the index does not exist.

The point is that I would not expect the exception to be thrown when ignore_unavailable=true but I would expect it to be thrown when ignore_unavailable=false.

What do you mean by 'worked fine' when you did your test? If you got a 404 then I would say it did not work fine.

4

That's about unavailable shards, not unavailable indices though.

5

Ah, ok, that explains why it's not working as I expect. This means the documentation is misleading since it says the following:

"An error will be thrown if the request explicitly refers to a missing index. This behaviour can be disabled using the ignore_unavailable=true parameter"

https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/1.7/indices-open-close.html

6

Hmm ok, that may be a misunderstanding on my part. That setting is also used in snapshot for shards.

I'll ask around.

7

Hi Mark, Thanks for looking into this.

I've noticed that when using the restore command that ignore_unavailable=true behaves as I expect. This means that I can restore a snapshot even if all my indexes are missing and it will not throw an exception. This is why I was expecting similar behaviour for close command with the same option setting.

8

Checkout https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch/issues/14102