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You're viewing version 3.8 of the OpenSearch documentation. This version is no longer maintained. For the latest version, see the current documentation. For information about OpenSearch version maintenance, see Release Schedule and Maintenance Policy.

Ingest your data into OpenSearch

Adding a document to an index is called ingesting or indexing the document. Although the terms are often used interchangeably, they have slightly different meanings: ingesting data means adding it to OpenSearch, while indexing means organizing that data so that it can be searched. When you add a document to an index, OpenSearch automatically indexes the document.

In Add and manage your data, you added documents one at a time. Because sending a separate request for every document isn’t practical for a real dataset, OpenSearch provides the Bulk API, which indexes many documents in a single request.

Bulk indexing

These examples assume that the students index doesn’t exist. If you didn’t delete it at the end of Add and manage your data, send a DELETE /students request first.

To index several documents into the students index in one request, send the following request:

POST _bulk
{ "create": { "_index": "students", "_id": "1" } }
{ "name": "John Doe", "gpa": 3.89, "grad_year": 2022 }
{ "create": { "_index": "students", "_id": "2" } }
{ "name": "Jonathan Powers", "gpa": 3.85, "grad_year": 2025 }
{ "create": { "_index": "students", "_id": "3" } }
{ "name": "Jane Doe", "gpa": 3.52, "grad_year": 2024 }

Each document takes two lines: an action line naming the index and document ID, followed by the document itself. The create action fails if a document with that ID already exists; use index instead to overwrite existing documents.

To index your own data from a file, send the file to the _bulk endpoint. For more information, see Submitting bulk requests using cURL.

Other ways to ingest data

Along with the Bulk API, you can ingest data into OpenSearch in the following ways:

  • Collect, transform, and route data from your sources using OpenSearch Data Prepper, a server-side data collector that can enrich data for downstream analysis and visualization. For more information, see Data Prepper.
  • Index data from your application using an OpenSearch language client, which sends requests for you in the language you’re already writing in. For more information, see Language clients.
  • Send data using a log agent or data collection tool that you already run. OpenSearch supports a range of third-party agents and ingestion tools. For more information, see Agents and ingestion tools.

Next steps

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