Type to search.

Cancel a task

  • POST /_tasks/{task_id}/_cancel
  • POST /_tasks/_cancel
Auth The Elastic Stack includes Elastic's core products such as Elasticsearch, Kibana, Logstash, and Beats. Availability Preview since 2.3 This functionality is in technical preview and is ready for evaluation. Use with caution in production; it is not recommended for mission-critical workloads. Elastic will work to fix any issues, but features in technical preview are not subject to the support SLA of official GA features. Specific Support terms apply. Unless stated otherwise on the page, this functionality is available when your Elastic Stack is deployed on Elastic Cloud Hosted, Elastic Cloud Enterprise, Elastic Cloud on Kubernetes, and self-managed environments. This documentation corresponds to the latest patch available for each minor version. If you're not using the latest patch, check the release notes for changes.
Warning

The task management API is new and should still be considered a beta feature. The API may change in ways that are not backwards compatible.

A task may continue to run for some time after it has been cancelled because it may not be able to safely stop its current activity straight away. It is also possible that Elasticsearch must complete its work on other tasks before it can process the cancellation. The get task information API will continue to list these cancelled tasks until they complete. The cancelled flag in the response indicates that the cancellation command has been processed and the task will stop as soon as possible.

To troubleshoot why a cancelled task does not complete promptly, use the get task information API with the ?detailed parameter to identify the other tasks the system is running. You can also use the node hot threads API to obtain detailed information about the work the system is doing instead of completing the cancelled task.

Required privileges

Cluster privileges manage

Path parameters

task_id number | string optional

The task identifier.

Leave it out to use /_tasks/_cancel.

Query parameters

actions union string | string[]

A comma-separated list or wildcard expression of actions that is used to limit the request.

nodes string[]

A comma-separated list of node IDs or names that is used to limit the request.

parent_task_id string

A parent task ID that is used to limit the tasks.

wait_for_completion boolean · default: false

If true, the request blocks until all found tasks are complete.

Response

application/json
nodes map string to object

Task information grouped by node, if group_by was set to node (the default).

tasks union oneOf

Either a flat list of tasks if group_by was set to none, or grouped by parents if group_by was set to parents.

One of:
{} TaskInfo[]
action string required
cancelled boolean
cancellable boolean required
description string

Human readable text that identifies the particular request that the task is performing. For example, it might identify the search request being performed by a search task. Other kinds of tasks have different descriptions, like _reindex which has the source and the destination, or _bulk which just has the number of requests and the destination indices. Many requests will have only an empty description because more detailed information about the request is not easily available or particularly helpful in identifying the request.

headers map string to string required
id number required
node string required
running_time union oneOf
Values: -1 0
running_time_in_nanos number required
start_time_in_millis number required
status object

The internal status of the task, which varies from task to task. The format also varies. While the goal is to keep the status for a particular task consistent from version to version, this is not always possible because sometimes the implementation changes. Fields might be removed from the status for a particular request so any parsing you do of the status might break in minor releases.

type string required
parent_task_id number | string