# No number-of-replicas/shards ... what then?
**URL:** https://discuss.elastic.co/t/no-number-of-replicas-shards-what-then/107386
**Category:** Elasticsearch
**Created:** [November 13, 2017, 12:11pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/no-number-of-replicas-shards-what-then/107386 "2017-11-13T12:11:35Z")
**Posts on this page:** 4
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@alexolivan](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/alexolivan)
#### Post date: [November 13, 2017, 12:11pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/no-number-of-replicas-shards-what-then/107386/1 "2017-11-13T12:11:35Z")
Hi again community!
I have just created a small cluster of VMs to keep with my experiments with new ELK5 and filebeat, and, to my surprise, I was unable to start EL until I removed shards/replica config from yml file...
By reading around, I readed that, those values have to be manually set per index.... and of course I can't believe this.
There should be a way to configure the thing, or a way to automate this.
If every day I get a new set of indexes, because logstash inserts data for services into indexes that do change their index name, every day, since it appends date at the end, there should be a way to control number of shards and replicas, otherwise, soon or later, indexes would start having default 1 replica unless we're manually intervening all the time... I'm sure I'm missing completelly the point, could you help me.
Thank you in advance.
Best regards!
---
### Author:  [@Christian\_Dahlqvist](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/Christian_Dahlqvist)
#### Post date: [November 13, 2017, 12:15pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/no-number-of-replicas-shards-what-then/107386/2 "2017-11-13T12:15:03Z")
This is typically managed through [index templates](https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/5.6/indices-templates.html), so I would recommend you have a look at that.
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### Author:  [@alexolivan](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/alexolivan)
#### Post date: [November 13, 2017, 12:39pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/no-number-of-replicas-shards-what-then/107386/3 "2017-11-13T12:39:23Z")
Hi! thank you for your help...
Ok... readed that... a little bit overwheelming, when considering how simple is what it was, but here we go:
Provide that I have a bunch of logstash-servicefoo-YYYY.MM.DD, logstash-servicebar-YYYY.MM.DD, as were the result of folowing the classic ELK howtos of my era (1.x).
Provide that I don't care about aliasing, iteming or remaping and all that, but just want to have 2 replicas and lets say, 6 shards, for my minimal mockup cluster
Then I would need omething like that.... right?
curl -XPUT 'localhost:9200/\_template/logstash?pretty' -H 'Content-Type: application/json' -d'
{
"template" : "logstash-\*",
"settings" : {
"number\_of\_replicas" : 2,
"number\_of\_shards" : 6
}
}
'
I'm tryng to try it, but, pasting this into the console seems to not like the server 😛 probably there's a typo...
EDIT: worked as a one-liner...
curl -XPUT '192.168.100.4:9200/\_template/logstash?pretty' -H 'Content-Type: application/json' -d'{ "template" : "logstash-\*", "settings" : { "number\_of\_replicas" : 2, "number\_of\_shards" : 6 } }'
which caused:
{
"acknowledged" : true
}
Let's see what happens next!
EDIT: ouch! that screwed the default logstash template... I think I'm starting to get the point behind templates, and how it adds a whole new layer of possible configuration on incoming data... but I miss a litle bit of more classic control through config files, at least for defaults
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### Author:  [@system](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/system)
#### Post date: [December 11, 2017, 12:39pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/no-number-of-replicas-shards-what-then/107386/4 "2017-12-11T12:39:26Z")
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