Working with TTL (time-to-live) indexes

Create TTL index

creates a TTL (time-to-live) index

POST /_api/index

Query Parameters

• collection (string, required): The collection name.

Request Body

• type (string, required): must be equal to “ttl”.

• name (string, optional): An easy-to-remember name for the index to look it up or refer to it in index hints. Index names are subject to the same character restrictions as collection names. If omitted, a name is auto-generated so that it is unique with respect to the collection, e.g. idx_832910498.

• fields (array of strings, required): an array with exactly one attribute path.

• expireAfter (number, required): The time interval (in seconds) from the point in time stored in the fields attribute after which the documents count as expired. Can be set to 0 to let documents expire as soon as the server time passes the point in time stored in the document attribute, or to a higher number to delay the expiration.

• inBackground (boolean, optional): The optional attribute inBackground can be set to true to create the index in the background, which will not write-lock the underlying collection for as long as if the index is built in the foreground. The default value is false.

Creates a TTL index for the collection collection-name if it does not already exist. The call expects an object containing the index details.

Responses

HTTP 200: If the index already exists, then a HTTP 200 is returned.

HTTP 201: If the index does not already exist and could be created, then a HTTP 201 is returned.

HTTP 400: If the collection already contains another TTL index, then an HTTP 400 is returned, as there can be at most one TTL index per collection.

HTTP 404: If the collection-name is unknown, then a HTTP 404 is returned.

Examples

Creating a TTL index

shell> curl -X POST --header 'accept: application/json' --data-binary @- --dump - http://localhost:8529/_api/index?collection=sessions <<EOF
{ 
  "type" : "ttl", 
  "expireAfter" : 3600, 
  "fields" : [ 
    "createdAt" 
  ] 
}
EOF

HTTP/1.1 201 Created
content-type: application/json
cache-control: no-cache, no-store, must-revalidate, pre-check=0, post-check=0, max-age=0, s-maxage=0
connection: Keep-Alive
content-length: 205
content-security-policy: frame-ancestors 'self'; form-action 'self';
expires: 0
pragma: no-cache
server: ArangoDB
strict-transport-security: max-age=31536000 ; includeSubDomains
x-arango-queue-time-seconds: 0.000000
x-content-type-options: nosniff

{ 
  "estimates" : false, 
  "expireAfter" : 3600, 
  "fields" : [ 
    "createdAt" 
  ], 
  "id" : "sessions/70064", 
  "isNewlyCreated" : true, 
  "name" : "idx_1762249890430189568", 
  "sparse" : true, 
  "type" : "ttl", 
  "unique" : false, 
  "error" : false, 
  "code" : 201 
}

shell> curl -X POST --header 'accept: application/json' --data-binary @- --dump - http://localhost:8529/_api/index?collection=sessions <<EOF
{ 
  "type" : "ttl", 
  "expireAfter" : 3600, 
  "fields" : [ 
    "createdAt" 
  ] 
}
EOF

HTTP/1.1 201 Created
content-type: application/json
cache-control: no-cache, no-store, must-revalidate, pre-check=0, post-check=0, max-age=0, s-maxage=0
connection: Keep-Alive
content-length: 205
content-security-policy: frame-ancestors 'self'; form-action 'self';
expires: 0
pragma: no-cache
server: ArangoDB
strict-transport-security: max-age=31536000 ; includeSubDomains
x-arango-queue-time-seconds: 0.000000
x-content-type-options: nosniff