Manage index policies

  • 2 minutes

When you create a new container, you can specify the indexing policy at the point of creation using the CLI.

Note

Remember, if you do not specify the indexing policy, the default policy will be used.

To create a new container with a custom index policy, you must use the --idx argument in one of two ways.

JSON file

You can pass in the name of a JSON file with a custom index policy. Let's assume that you have an indexing policy defined in a file named policy.json.

{
  "indexingMode": "consistent",
  "automatic": true,
  "includedPaths": [
    {
      "path": "/*"
    }
  ],
  "excludedPaths": [
    {
      "path": "/headquarters/*"
    },
    {
      "path": "/\"_etag\"/?"
    }
  ]
}

You only need to pass in the filename to the CLI command for the --idx argument.

az cosmosdb sql container create \
    --account-name '<account-name>' \
    --resource-group '<resource-group>' \
    --database-name '<database-name>' \
    --name '<container-name>' \
    --partition-key-path '<partition-key-path-string>' \
    --idx '@.\policy.json' \
    --throughput '400'

Raw JSON string

Alternatively, you can pass in a raw JSON string with the indexing policy defined. This example uses the same JSON indexing policy defined as a minified string:

az cosmosdb sql container create \
    --account-name '<account-name>' \
    --resource-group '<resource-group>' \
    --database-name '<database-name>' \
    --name '<container-name>' \
    --partition-key-path '<partition-key-path-string>' \
    --idx '{\"indexingMode\":\"consistent\",\"automatic\":true,\"includedPaths\":[{\"path\":\"/*\"}],\"excludedPaths\":[{\"path\":\"/headquarters/*\"},{\"path\":\"/\\\"_etag\\\"/?\"}]}' \
    --throughput '400'

Tip

If you are planning to use a raw JSON string with the --idx argument, you should read up on your shell's specific behavior around escaping and processing strings. Common shells like Bash and PowerShell can have wildly different behaviors when processing JSON string literals.