How to fix ElasticSearch 'Fielddata is disabled on text fields by default' for keyword field

Problem:

You have a field in ElasticSearch named e.g. patterns of type keyword. However, when you query for an aggregation of this field e.g.

es.search(index="strings", body={
    "size": 0,
    "aggs" : {
        "patterns" : {
            "terms" : { "field" : "pattern" }
        }
    }
})

you see this error message:

elasticsearch.exceptions.RequestError: RequestError(400, 'search_phase_execution_exception', 'Fielddata is disabled on text fields by default. Set fielddata=true on [pattern] in order to load fielddata in memory by uninverting the inverted index. Note that this can however use significant memory. Alternatively use a keyword field instead.'

Solution

This error message is confusing since you already have a keyword field. However, the ElasticSearch fielddata documentation tells us that you need to to use pattern.keyword in the query instead of just pattern.

Full example:

es.search(index="strings", body={
    "size": 0,
    "aggs" : {
        "patterns" : {
            "terms" : { "field" : "pattern.keyword" }
        }
    }
})