# Undocumented "Feature" **URL:** \ **Category:** Elasticsearch\ **Created:** [November 8, 2011, 11:02pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/undocumented-feature/5822 "2011-11-08T23:02:12Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 6\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![Kenneth\_Loafman](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/elastic/user_avatar/discuss.elastic.co/kenneth_loafman/32/2224_2.png) [@Kenneth\_Loafman](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/Kenneth_Loafman)\ **Post date:** [November 8, 2011, 11:02pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/undocumented-feature/5822/1 "2011-11-08T23:02:12Z")
Hi, I think this is a bug. If you enter: $ curl -XDELETE [http://localhost:9200/](http://localhost:9200/) you will delete every index in the cluster! Not a pretty site! This is on 18-SNAPSHOT a couple of weeks old. ...Ken ---
**Author:** ![AEvar\_Arnfjord\_Bjarm](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/elastic/user_avatar/discuss.elastic.co/aevar_arnfjord_bjarm/32/2746_2.png) [@AEvar\_Arnfjord\_Bjarm](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/AEvar_Arnfjord_Bjarm)\ **Post date:** [November 8, 2011, 11:17pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/undocumented-feature/5822/2 "2011-11-08T23:17:31Z")
It's not a bug, when you don't specify an index a lot of operations operate on all indexes. This is very handy for e.g. optimizing all indexes, or in development drop them all. ---
**Author:** ![Kenneth\_Loafman\_2](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/elastic/user_avatar/discuss.elastic.co/kenneth_loafman_2/32/2224_2.png) [@Kenneth\_Loafman\_2](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/Kenneth_Loafman_2)\ **Post date:** [November 8, 2011, 11:52pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/undocumented-feature/5822/3 "2011-11-08T23:52:49Z")
Great for development, maybe, but a nuclear bomb in production. ...Ken On Tue, Nov 8, 2011 at 5:17 PM, Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason [avarab@gmail.com](mailto:avarab@gmail.com)wrote: > It's not a bug, when you don't specify an index a lot of operations > operate on all indexes. This is very handy for e.g. optimizing all indexes, > or in development drop them all. ---
**Author:** ![Benjamin\_Deveze](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/elastic/user_avatar/discuss.elastic.co/benjamin_deveze/32/1577_2.png) [@Benjamin\_Deveze](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/Benjamin_Deveze)\ **Post date:** [November 9, 2011, 8:03am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/undocumented-feature/5822/4 "2011-11-09T08:03:45Z")
Hi Kenneth, in production you can use this setting in your config file to avoid nuclear bomb 😉 action.disable\_delete\_all\_indices (defaults to false) that can be set to true in order to disable deleting all indices in a single API call. ---
**Author:** ![AEvar\_Arnfjord\_Bjarm](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/elastic/user_avatar/discuss.elastic.co/aevar_arnfjord_bjarm/32/2746_2.png) [@AEvar\_Arnfjord\_Bjarm](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/AEvar_Arnfjord_Bjarm)\ **Post date:** [November 9, 2011, 10:44am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/undocumented-feature/5822/5 "2011-11-09T10:44:53Z")
On Wed, Nov 9, 2011 at 00:52, Kenneth Loafman [kenneth@loafman.com](mailto:kenneth@loafman.com) wrote: > Great for development, maybe, but a nuclear bomb in production. > ...Ken IMNSHO: If you're performing manual maintenance with curl like this in production you've got bigger problems that ES performing wildcard operations when you don't specify specific indexes. Where I work with ES in production it's set up so that: - Anything like Elasticsearch Head etc. communicates with it it through an http proxy that only allows GET requests through. - Any creation / maintenance etc. of indexes is done by cronjobs that have been tested in a development environment first and not by people manually executing curl commands on production machines. ---
**Author:** ![system](https://us1.discourse-cdn.com/elastic/original/3X/1/a/1ac57faf039f6b580b3f104ef42a2a89e41014de.png) [@system](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/system)\ **Post date:** [July 6, 2017, 3:49am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/undocumented-feature/5822/6 "2017-07-06T03:49:22Z")