Elasticsearch Tutorial: Getting Hands-On

This tutorial gets you started using Elasticsearch. You’ll learn how to create and delete an index, how to load data into it and perform basic queries.

Visualizing data in Kibana, image created by myself

This is not just a quick how-to guide. Although it can be used as such, I also did my best to explain some history and the internals of Elasticsearch in this tutorial. I believe it’s worth your time to invest in knowing why a product works and how it came to be. Such fundamental knowledge will help you make smarter choices that you won’t regret later on.

In this tutorial, I will use curl commands to talk to the Elasticsearch REST API. You can easily copy and paste them, but you can use any other tool you like. For example, Kibana’s Devtools automatically recognizes and converts curl commands you paste into its window.

Just in case you’re not familiar with Elasticsearch, you might want to read this first:

Elasticsearch: What Is It, And Why You Need It?

Setting up a test environment