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Painless Guide | Painless Scripting Language [8.19] | Elastic
A Brief Painless Walkthrough »
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Painless Guide

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Painless Guide

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Painless is a simple, secure scripting language designed specifically for use with elasticsearch. It is the default scripting language for elasticsearch and can safely be used for inline and stored scripts. For a jump start into Painless, see A Brief Painless Walkthrough. For a detailed description of the Painless syntax and language features, see the Painless Language Specification.

You can use Painless anywhere scripts are used in elasticsearch. Painless provides:

  • Fast performance: Painless scripts run several times faster than the alternatives.
  • Safety: Fine-grained allowlist with method call/field granularity. See the Painless API Reference for a complete list of available classes and methods.
  • Optional typing: Variables and parameters can use explicit types or the dynamic def type.
  • Syntax: Extends a subset of Java’s syntax to provide additional scripting language features.
  • Optimizations: Designed specifically for elasticsearch scripting.
A Brief Painless Walkthrough »