Set default index automatically in new spaces

[Steven_Ensslen]

I'm using the Rest API to create spaces for all of my different user groups in my Kibana 6.7.1 hosted in Elastic Cloud.

How do I set the default index in all of the spaces without having to use the web interface? I've not found anything in the current documentation, and the api/kibana/settings/defaultIndex API merrily replies 200 to my {"value": "space:index-pattern:indexPatternName"} POST body but doesn't seem to do anything. It particularly does not seem to have updated the index-pattern or the space's config documents in the index pointed to by the.kibana alias. Nor does the UI respond as if the index-pattern has been set. This behaviour appears to have been happening since 6.1.

[Larry_Gregory]

Hey @Steven_Ensslen,

To set the default index pattern for a new space, you can prefix the API call with the space identifier. For example, if you are setting this for the "Marketing" space with a Space Identifier of marketing, then your API call would look something like:

POST /s/marketing/api/kibana/settings/defaultIndex

{
   "value": "indexPatternGUID"
}

If you were to inspect your .kibana index, this would set the default index pattern for the marketing space to the index pattern with the document id marketing:index-pattern:indexPatternGUID.

A couple of notes:

• This will not create the index pattern; it only tells Kibana which index pattern should be the default for that particular space.
• The API endpoint to set the default index pattern is not a publicly documented API, so it can potentially change unexpectedly between versions.
• We recognize the docs for calling APIs within a particular space are lacking. We have a few open issues to improve the documentation, including https://github.com/elastic/kibana/issues/29646

[Steven_Ensslen]

Thanks @Larry_Gregory!

For future reference, the mistake that I was making was the value I provided in value. The indexPatternGUID is the only thing to be entered there.