Elasticsearch Curator automates housekeeping for groups of stored search data called indices. An operator can define which indices an action applies to and schedule tasks such as taking snapshots or removing old data. It is useful when that maintenance needs repeatable rules instead of manual administration. Because a selection rule can delete valuable records, understanding the matched indices and the recovery copy is as important as scheduling the job.
Deployment and operating notes
Elastic’s current Curator reference states that Curator is major-version locked to Elasticsearch. The retired incubator chart and old pip-install examples do not establish compatibility with a current cluster. For time-based index retention and rollover, evaluate Elasticsearch Index Lifecycle Management as well as an external Curator job; they should not independently delete the same data.
Inventory every action file, index-selection filter, snapshot repository and schedule before changing the tool. Test filters against a list of indices and use a non-destructive rehearsal before enabling deletion or close operations. Check whether data streams, aliases and lifecycle-managed indices need different handling from the historical daily-index pattern. Preserve a verified snapshot and confirm the account can restore it, not just create it. If moving retention into ILM, map the intended age and rollover semantics and disable the corresponding external action deliberately. A Helm rollback cannot recover deleted indices, so recovery depends on retained snapshots and a tested restore procedure.
Historical upstream link check · 2026-10-09
The recorded upstream address responded successfully (HTTP 200) on 2026-10-09. GitHub confirms that helm/charts is archived: this is a historical chart distribution, not evidence that the application itself is retired. Link availability does not certify the historical installation instructions or current security support.
Website availability is separate from project, chart and image support. Use the current guidance and primary sources on this page to assess the distribution.
Historical Kubedex content
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This directory contains a Kubernetes chart to deploy the Elasticsearch Curator.
What is Curator?
ElasticCurator is a tool from Elastic (the company behind Elasticsearch) to help manage your Elasticsearch cluster. One of Postmark’s main usages for Elasticsearch is for storing the emails that you have sent and received. We use one Elasticsearch index per day and keep a rolling 45 day window of history. This means that every day we need to create, backup, and delete some indices. Curator helps make this process automated and repeatable.
Curator is written in Python, so it is well supported almost all operating systems. Installation is a breeze with a pip install elasticsearch-curator. That provides you with the curator command that you can use. There’s also a Python API that you can access from your Python programs, but we only use the command line interface.
Elasticsearch Curator helps you curate, or manage, your Elasticsearch indices and snapshots by:
- Obtaining the full list of indices (or snapshots) from the cluster, as the actionable list
- Iterate through a list of user-defined filters to progressively remove indices (or snapshots) from this actionable list as needed.
- Perform various actions on the items which remain on the actionable list.
Features
Curator allows for many different operations to be performed to both indices and snapshots, including:
- Add or remove indices (or both!) from an alias
- Change shard routing allocation
- Close indices
- Create index
- Delete indices
- Delete snapshots
- Open closed indices
- forceMerge indices
- reindex indices, including from remote clusters
- Change the number of replicas per shard for indices
- rollover indices
- Take a snapshot (backup) of indices
- Restore snapshots
Sources & further reading
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