A collection of shortcuts when working with elasticsearch:

When you execute a command from the command line, use curl.

curl -XGET 'http://elasticsearch.example.com:9200/_all/_settings?pretty'

However typing out elasticsearch.example.com:9200 every time gets tedious. Add the following to your ~/.bashrc (or ~/.bash_profile if on Mac)

export ELK="http://elasticsearch.example.com:9200/"
clk() {
  curl $ELK/$1
}

Then instead of typing out the full url, just type

clk /_all/_settings?pretty  

Clear Cache

POST 'http://elasticsearch.example.com:9200/_cache/clear' -d '{ "fielddata": "true" }'

CAT

Cat is an api that provides a lot of information about nodes

GET /_cat/nodes?help'
GET /_cat/nodes?v&h=indexing.index_current'

Fielddata

Field data provides information about the performance and memory

GET /_all/_settings?pretty'
GET /_cluster/settings?pretty'
GET /_stats/fielddata?pretty&fields=*  #Per index 
GET /_nodes/stats/indices/fielddata?fields=* #Per Node