How to do it...

The REST API URL is the same as the GET calls, but the HTTP method is DELETE:

http://<server>/<index_name>/_doc/<id>

To delete a document, we will perform the following steps:

1. If we consider the order indexed in the Indexing a document recipe, the call to delete a document will be as follows:

DELETE /myindex/_doc/2qLrAfPVQvCRMe7Ku8r0Tw

1. The result returned by Elasticsearch should be as follows:

{
  "_index" : "myindex",
  "_type" : "_doc",
  "_id" : "2qLrAfPVQvCRMe7Ku8r0Tw",
  "_version" : 2,
  "result" : "deleted",
  "_shards" : {
    "total" : 2,
    "successful" : 1,
    "failed" : 0
  },
  "_seq_no" : 3,
  "_primary_term" : 1
}

1. If the record is missing, a 404 is returned as the status code, and the return JSON will be as follows:

{
  "_index" : "myindex",
  "_type" : "_doc",
  "_id" : "2qLrAfPVQvCRMe7Ku8r0Tw",
  "_version" : 3,
  "result" : "not_found",
  "_shards" : {
    "total" : 2,
    "successful" : 1,
    "failed" : 0
  },
  "_seq_no" : 4,
  "_primary_term" : 1
}