Migrating to 8.1

Migrating to 8.1

This section discusses the changes that you need to be aware of when migrating your application to Elasticsearch 8.1.

See also What’s new in 8.17 and Release notes.

Breaking changes

The following changes in Elasticsearch 8.1 might affect your applications and prevent them from operating normally. Before upgrading to 8.1, review these changes and take the described steps to mitigate the impact.

REST API changes

The search API’s fields parameter now normalizes geometry objects that cross the international dateline

Details
The search API’s fields parameter now normalizes geo_shape objects that cross the international dateline (+/-180° longitude). For example, if a polygon crosses the dateline, the fields parameter returns it as two polygons. You can still retrieve original, unnormalized geometry objects from _source.

Impact
If your application requires unnormalized geometry objects, retrieve them from _source rather than using the fields parameter.

Deprecations

The following functionality has been deprecated in Elasticsearch 8.1 and will be removed in a future version. While this won’t have an immediate impact on your applications, we strongly encourage you take the described steps to update your code after upgrading to 8.1.

To find out if you are using any deprecated functionality, enable deprecation logging.

Cluster and node setting deprecations

Legacy values for the discovery.type setting are deprecated

Details
Legacy values for the discovery.type setting are deprecated and will be forbidden in a future version.

Impact
Do not set discovery.type to any value except single-node or multi-node. All other values are equivalent to the default discovery type which is multi-node. Where possible, omit this setting so that Elasticsearch uses the default discovery type.

REST API deprecations

Lenient parsing of bulk actions is deprecated

Details
Older versions of Elasticsearch parse the action lines of bulk requests very permissively and would silently ignore invalid or malformed actions. This lenience is deprecated and a future version will reject bulk requests containing invalid actions.

Impact
Ensure that bulk actions are well-formed JSON objects containing a single entry with the correct key.

Deprecate index_include_frozen request parameter in _sql API

Details
Following the deprecation of frozen indices, the index_include_frozen parameter and FROZEN syntax is now also deprecated.

Impact
You should unfreeze frozen indices using the unfreeze index API and stop using the index_include_frozen parameter or the FROZEN keyword in SQL queries. For some use cases, the frozen tier may be a suitable replacement for frozen indices. See data tiers for more information.