Hello Crate

To get started let’s have a quick look on how Crate can be accessed via the bare HTTP-Endpoints. This tutorial uses the Curl command-line utility to do the requests.

To check if Crate is running, we can do a GET on the root, which displays basic system information:

sh$ curl -sS 'localhost:9200/?pretty=1'
{
  "ok" : true,
  "status" : 200,
  "name" : "...",
  "version" : {
    "number" : "0.90.3",
    "build_hash" : "${buildNumber}",
    "build_timestamp" : "NA",
    "build_snapshot" : false,
    "lucene_version" : "4.4"
  },
  "tagline" : "You Know, for Search"
}

Note

The pretty query parameter used above tells Crate to pretty print results. This works for every endpoint.

In this guide we want to create a database for quotes. Let’s create the index and the quote type, which will contain information about the author of the quote and the quote itself:

sh$ curl -sSX PUT 'localhost:9200/quotes?pretty' -d @- <<EOF
... {
... "mappings" : {
...  "default": {
...   "properties": {
...     "author": {
...       "type": "string",
...       "index": "not_analyzed"
...     },
...     "content": {
...      "type": "string"
... }}}}}
... EOF
{
  "ok" : true,
  "acknowledged" : true
}

Now we can add the first quote to the database:

sh$ curl -sSX POST 'localhost:9200/_sql?pretty=1&refresh=true' -d @- <<EOF
... {
... "stmt": "insert into quotes values('Me', 'Hello Crate!')"
... }
... EOF
{
  "cols" : [ ],
  "rows" : [ ]
}

Refresh in order to make the result immediatly visible in subsequent queries:

sh$ curl -sSX POST 'localhost:9200/quotes/_refresh?pretty=1'
{
  "ok" : true,
  "_shards" : {
    "total" : 10,
    "successful" : 5,
    "failed" : 0
  }
}

We can now view what we have just inserted like this:

sh$ curl -sSX POST 'localhost:9200/_sql?pretty=1' -d @- <<EOF
... {
... "stmt": "select author, content from quotes order by author"
... }
... EOF
{
  "cols" : [ "author", "content" ],
  "rows" : [ [ "Me", "Hello Crate!" ] ]
}

Let’s add another quote:

sh$ curl -sSX POST 'localhost:9200/_sql?pretty=1&refresh=true' -d @- <<EOF
... {
... "stmt": "insert into quotes values('Ford', 'Don''t panic... don''t panic...')"
... }
... EOF
{
  "cols" : [ ],
  "rows" : [ ]
}

Refresh again:

sh$ curl -sSX POST 'localhost:9200/quotes/_refresh?pretty=1'
{
  "ok" : true,
  "_shards" : {
    "total" : 10,
    "successful" : 5,
    "failed" : 0
  }
}

Looking up only Ford’s quotes:

sh$ curl -sSX POST 'localhost:9200/_sql?pretty=1' -d @- <<EOF
... {
... "stmt": "select content from quotes where author='Ford'"
... }
... EOF
{
  "cols" : [ "content" ],
  "rows" : [ [ "Don't panic... don't panic..." ] ]
}

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