Setting Elastic search limit to "unlimited"

You can use the from and size parameters to page through all your data. This could be very slow depending on your data and how much is in the index.

http://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/current/search-request-from-size.html

Another approach is to first do a searchType: 'count', then and then do a normal search with size set to results.count.

The advantage here is it avoids depending on a magic number for UPPER_BOUND as suggested in this similar SO question, and avoids the extra overhead of building too large of a priority queue that Shay Banon describes here. It also lets you keep your results sorted, unlike scan.

The biggest disadvantage is that it requires two requests. Depending on your circumstance, this may be acceptable.

From the docs, "Note that from + size can not be more than the index.max_result_window index setting which defaults to 10,000". So my admittedly very ad-hoc solution is to just pass size: 10000 or 10,000 minus from if I use the from argument.

Note that following Matt's comment below, the proper way to do this if you have a larger amount of documents is to use the scroll api. I have used this successfully, but only with the python interface.

use the scan method e.g.

 curl -XGET 'localhost:9200/_search?search_type=scan&scroll=10m&size=50' -d '
 {
    "query" : {
       "match_all" : {}
     }
 }

see here