The put mapping API allows to register specific mapping definition for a specific type.

$ curl -XPUT 'http://localhost:9200/twitter/tweet/_mapping' -d '
{
    "tweet" : {
        "properties" : {
            "message" : {"type" : "string", "store" : "yes"}
        }
    }
}
'

The above example creates a mapping called tweet within the twitter index. The mapping simply defines that the message field should be stored (by default, fields are not stored, just indexed) so we can retrieve it later on using selective loading.

More information on how to define type mappings can be found in the mapping section.

Merging & Conflicts

When an existing mapping already exists under the given type, the two mapping definitions, the one already defined, and the new ones are merged. The ignore_conflicts parameters can be used to control if conflicts should be ignored or not, by default, it is set to false which means conflicts are not ignored.

The definition of conflict is really dependent on the type merged, but in general, if a different core type is defined, it is considered as a conflict. New mapping definitions can be added to object types, and core type mapping can be upgraded to multi_field type.

Multi Index

The put mapping API can be applied to more than one index with a single call, or even on _all the indices.

$ curl -XPUT 'http://localhost:9200/kimchy,elasticsearch/tweet/_mapping' -d '
{
    "tweet" : {
        "properties" : {
            "message" : {"type" : "string", "store" : "yes"}
        }
    }
}
'