The Elasticsearch docs are in AsciiDoc format and can be built using the Elasticsearch documentation build process.

See: https://github.com/elastic/docs

Snippets marked with // CONSOLE are automatically annotated with "VIEW IN CONSOLE" and "COPY AS CURL" in the documentation and are automatically tested by the command gradle :docs:check. To test just the docs from a single page, use e.g. gradle :docs:check -Dtests.method="rollover".

By default each // CONSOLE snippet runs as its own isolated test. You can manipulate the test execution in the following ways:

• // TEST: Explicitly marks a snippet as a test. Snippets marked this way are tests even if they don’t have // CONSOLE but usually // TEST is used for its modifiers:

• // TEST[s/foo/bar/]: Replace foo with bar in the generated test. This should be used sparingly because it makes the snippet "lie". Sometimes, though, you can use it to make the snippet more clear more clear. Keep in mind the that if there are multiple substitutions then they are applied in the order that they are defined.

• // TEST[catch:foo]: Used to expect errors in the requests. Replace foo with request to expect a 400 error, for example. If the snippet contains multiple requests then only the last request will expect the error.

• // TEST[continued]: Continue the test started in the last snippet. Between tests the nodes are cleaned: indexes are removed, etc. This prevents that from happening between snippets because the two snippets are a single test. This is most useful when you have text and snippets that work together to tell the story of some use case because it merges the snippets (and thus the use case) into one big test.

• // TEST[skip:reason]: Skip this test. Replace reason with the actual reason to skip the test. Snippets without // TEST or // CONSOLE aren’t considered tests anyway but this is useful for explicitly documenting the reason why the test shouldn’t be run.

• // TEST[setup:name]: Run some setup code before running the snippet. This is useful for creating and populating indexes used in the snippet. The setup code is defined in docs/build.gradle.

• // TEST[warning:some warning]: Expect the response to include a Warning header. If the response doesn’t include a Warning header with the exact text then the test fails. If the response includes Warning headers that aren’t expected then the test fails.

• // TESTRESPONSE: Matches this snippet against the body of the response of the last test. If the response is JSON then order is ignored. If you add // TEST[continued] to the snippet after // TESTRESPONSE it will continue in the same test, allowing you to interleave requests with responses to check.

• // TESTRESPONSE[s/foo/bar/]: Substitutions. See // TEST[s/foo/bar] for how it works. These are much more common than // TEST[s/foo/bar] because they are useful for eliding portions of the response that are not pertinent to the documentation.

• One interesting difference here is that you often want to match against the response from Elasticsearch. To do that you can reference the "body" of the response like this: // TESTRESPONSE[s/"took": 25/"took": $body.took/]. Note the $body string. This says "I don’t expect that 25 number in the response, just match against what is in the response." Instead of writing the path into the response after $body you can write $_path which "figures out" the path. This is especially useful for making sweeping assertions like "I made up all the numbers in this example, don’t compare them" which looks like // TESTRESPONSE[s/\d+/$body.$_path/].

• // TESTRESPONSE[_cat]: Add substitutions for testing _cat responses. Use this after all other substitutions so it doesn’t make other substitutions difficult.

• // TESTSETUP: Marks this snippet as the "setup" for all other snippets in this file. This is a somewhat natural way of structuring documentation. You say "this is the data we use to explain this feature" then you add the snippet that you mark // TESTSETUP and then every snippet will turn into a test that runs the setup snippet first. See the "painless" docs for a file that puts this to good use. This is fairly similar to // TEST[setup:name] but rather than the setup defined in docs/build.gradle the setup is defined right in the documentation file.

In addition to the standard CONSOLE syntax these snippets can contain blocks of yaml surrounded by markers like this:

startyaml
  - compare_analyzers: {index: thai_example, first: thai, second: rebuilt_thai}
endyaml

This allows slightly more expressive testing of the snippets. Since that syntax is not supported by CONSOLE the usual way to incorporate it is with a // TEST[s//] marker like this:

// TEST[s/\n$/\nstartyaml\n  - compare_analyzers: {index: thai_example, first: thai, second: rebuilt_thai}\nendyaml\n/]

Any place you can use json you can use elements like $body.path.to.thing which is replaced on the fly with the contents of the thing at path.to.thing in the last response.