How to delete multiple documents that match a specific condition in Elasticsearch?

Deleting a single document is pretty straightforward in Elasticsearch. We can simply issue a DELETE on the document id and the document will be deleted from the index.

 $ curl -XDELETE localhost:9200/account/_doc/10?pretty
 {
   "_index" : "account",
   "_type" : "_doc",
   "_id" : "10",
   "_version" : 2,
   "result" : "deleted",
   "_shards" : {
     "total" : 2,
     "successful" : 1,
     "failed" : 0
   },
   "_seq_no" : 1000,
   "_primary_term" : 1
 }
 $ curl -X GET localhost:9200/account/_doc/10?pretty
 {
   "_index" : "account",
   "_type" : "_doc",
   "_id" : "10",
   "found" : false
 } 

What if we want to delete all documents from account index matching account_number greater than or equal to 15 and less than or equal to 20.

Delete by query

We have a total of 6 documents in the account index with account_number greater than or equal to 15 and less than or equal to 20.

 curl -X GET "localhost:9200/account/_search?pretty" -H 'Content-Type: application/json' -d'
 {
   "query": {
     "range": {
       "account_number": {
         "gte": 15,
         "lte": 20
       }
     }
   }
 }'
 {
   "took" : 3,
   "timed_out" : false,
   "_shards" : {
     "total" : 1,
     "successful" : 1,
     "skipped" : 0,
     "failed" : 0
   },
   "hits" : {
     "total" : {
       "value" : 6,
       "relation" : "eq"
     } 

We will issue a POST on _delete_by_query API with the query and range indicating  account_number greater than or equal to 15 and less than or equal to 20. And we can see from the output that matching 6 documents were deleted from index.

 curl -X POST "localhost:9200/account/_delete_by_query?pretty" -H 'Content-Type: application/json' -d'
 {
   "query": {
     "range": {
       "account_number": {
         "gte": 15,
         "lte": 20
       }
     }
   }
 }'
 {
   "took" : 80,
   "timed_out" : false,
   "total" : 6,
   "deleted" : 6,
   "batches" : 1,
   "version_conflicts" : 0,
   "noops" : 0,
   "retries" : {
     "bulk" : 0,
     "search" : 0
   },
   "throttled_millis" : 0,
   "requests_per_second" : -1.0,
   "throttled_until_millis" : 0,
   "failures" : [ ]
 } 

Let’s make sure the documents are truly gone by issuing the same initial search again and this time we see 0 hits which is what we expect to see.

 curl -X GET "localhost:9200/account/_search?pretty" -H 'Content-Type: application/json' -d'
 {
   "query": {
     "range": {
       "account_number": {
         "gte": 15,
         "lte": 20
       }
     }
   }
 }'
 {
   "took" : 3,
   "timed_out" : false,
   "_shards" : {
     "total" : 1,
     "successful" : 1,
     "skipped" : 0,
     "failed" : 0
   },
   "hits" : {
     "total" : {
       "value" : 0,
       "relation" : "eq"
     },
     "max_score" : null,
     "hits" : [ ]
   }
 }