20_Exists.asciidoc

Checking Whether a Document Exists

If all you want to do is to check whether a document exists—​you’re not interested in the content at all—​then use the HEAD method instead of the GET method. HEAD requests don’t return a body, just HTTP headers:

curl -i -XHEAD http://localhost:9200/website/blog/123

Elasticsearch will return a 200 OK status code if the document exists:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
Content-Length: 0

And a 404 Not Found if it doesn’t exist:

curl -i -XHEAD http://localhost:9200/website/blog/124

HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
Content-Length: 0

Of course, just because a document didn’t exist when you checked it, doesn’t mean that it won’t exist a millisecond later: another process might create the document in the meantime.