Elasticsearch- get all values for a given field?

How to get all possible values for field author?

curl -XGET  http://localhost:9200/articles/_search?pretty -d '
{
    "aggs" : {
        "whatever_you_like_here" : {
            "terms" : { "field" : "author", "size":10000 }
        }
    },
    "size" : 0
}'

Note

• "size":10000 Get at most 10000 unique values. Default is 10.

• "size":0 By default, "hits" contains 10 documents. We don't need them.

• By default, the buckets are ordered by the doc_count in decreasing order.

---

Reference: bucket terms aggregation

Also note, according to this page, facets have been replaced by aggregations in Elasticsearch 1.0, which are a superset of facets.

I think what you want is a faceted search. Have a look at this example from the documentation:

http://www.elasticsearch.org/guide/reference/api/search/facets/index.html

curl -X POST "http://localhost:9200/articles/_search?pretty=true" -d '
  {
    "query" : { "query_string" : {"query" : "*"} },
    "facets" : {
      "tags" : { "terms" : {"field" : "author"} }
    }
  }
'

See if you can tailor this to work for you.