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 8.1 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.