elasticsearch: reindexing an index

Question

I have an index which a few fields as keyword type. I need ot have these fields as text instead now.

Going through documentation , it seems to be not possible.

Documentation instead asks to create a new index and reindex it with documents from older index.

Can I keep new index name same as old one? Won't it cause issues during reindexing process?

Answer 1

no, you need to reindex to an index with a different name. One thing you could do, is to (1) reindex to eg original_index_name_v2 , (2) create an index alias named original_index_name catching original_index_name_* indices, (3) delete the original index. This way, next time you'll need to change the mapping, you don't need to change the index name but just keep querying the same alias