A lot of documents naturally come with an expiration date. Documents can therefore have a _ttl (time to live), which will cause the expired documents to be deleted automatically.

enabled

By default it is disabled, in order to enable it, the following mapping should be defined:

{
    "tweet" : {
        "_ttl" : { "enabled" : true }
    }
}

store / index

By default the _ttl field has store set to yes and index set to not_analyzed. Note that index property has to be set to not_analyzed in order for the purge process to work.

default

You can provide a per index/type default _ttl value as follows:

{
    "tweet" : {
        "_ttl" : { "enabled" : true, "default" : "1d" }
    }
}

In this case, if you don’t provide a _ttl value in your query or in the _source all tweets will have a _ttl of one day.

If no default is set and no _ttl value is given then the document has an infinite _ttl and will not expire.

Note on documents expiration

Expired documents will be automatically deleted regularly. You can dynamically set the indices.ttl.interval to fit your needs. The default value is 60s.

The deletion orders are processed by bulk. You can set indices.ttl.bulk_size to fit your needs. The default value is 10000.

Note that the expiration procedure handle versioning properly so if a document is updated between the collection of documents to expire and the delete order, the document won’t be deleted.