[[indices-seal]]
== Seal

The seal API allows to flush one or more indices and adds a marker to primaries and replicas if there are no pending write operations.
The seal marker is used during recovery after a node restarts. If a replica is allocated on a node which already has a shard copy with the same seal as the primary then no files will be copied during recovery.
Sealing is a best effort operation. If write operations are ongoing while the sealing is in progress then writing the seal might fail on some copies.

[source,js]
--------------------------------------------------
$ curl -XPOST 'http://localhost:9200/twitter/_seal'
--------------------------------------------------

The response contains details about for which shards a seal was written and the reason in case of failure.
Response in case all copies of a shard successfully wrote the seal:

[source,js]
--------------------------------------------------
{
   "twitter": [
      {
         "shard_id": 0,
         "responses": {
            "5wjOIntuRqy9F_7JRrrLwA": "success",
            "M2iCBe-nS5yaInE8volfSg": "success"
         },
         "message": "success"
      }
}
--------------------------------------------------


Response in case some copies of a shard failed:
[source,js]
--------------------------------------------------
{
   "twitter": [
      {
         "shard_id": 0,
         "responses": {
            "M2iCBe-nS5yaInE8volfSg": "pending operations",
            "5wjOIntuRqy9F_7JRrrLwA": "success"
         },
         "message": "failed on some copies"
      }
}
--------------------------------------------------


Response in case all copies of a shard failed:
[source,js]
--------------------------------------------------
{
   "twitter": [
      {
         "shard_id": 0,
         "message": "operation counter on primary is non zero [2]"
      }
}
--------------------------------------------------


[float]
[[seal-multi-index]]
=== Multi Index

The seal API can be applied to more than one index with a single call,
or even on `_all` the indices.

[source,js]
--------------------------------------------------
$ curl -XPOST 'http://localhost:9200/kimchy,elasticsearch/_seal'

$ curl -XPOST 'http://localhost:9200/_seal'
--------------------------------------------------