ArangoDB v3.10 reached End of Life (EOL) and is no longer supported.

This documentation is outdated. Please see the most recent stable version.

Working with TTL (time-to-live) indexes

Create a TTL index

POST /_api/index

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

Path Parameters

Query Parameters

collection* string
The collection name.

HTTP Headers

Request Body application/json object

expireAfter* number
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.
fields* array of strings
an array with exactly one attribute path.
inBackground boolean
You can set this option 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.
name string
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.
type* string
must be equal to "ttl".

Responses

200 OK
If the index already exists, then a HTTP 200 is returned.
201 Created
If the index does not already exist and could be created, then a HTTP 201 is returned.
400 Bad Request
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.
404 Not Found
If the collection-name is unknown, then a HTTP 404 is returned.

Examples

Creating a TTL index

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

Show output

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/71000", 
  "isNewlyCreated" : true, 
  "name" : "idx_1795421227174592513", 
  "sparse" : true, 
  "type" : "ttl", 
  "unique" : false, 
  "error" : false, 
  "code" : 201 
}