How to upload large amounts of stopwords into AWS Elasticsearch

Edit: You can now upload "packages" to AWS Elasticsearch service, which lets you add custom lists of stopwords etc. See https://docs.aws.amazon.com/elasticsearch-service/latest/developerguide/custom-packages.html

No, it isn't possible to upload a stopwords.txt file to the hosted AWS Elasticsearch service.

What you will have to do is specify the stopwords in a custom analyzer. More details on how to do that can be found in the official documentation.

The official documentation then says to "close and reopen" the index, but again, AWS Elasticsearch doesn't allow that, so you will then have to reindex.

Example:

1. Create an index with your stopwords listed inline within a custom analyzer, e.g.

    PUT /my_new_index
    {
      "settings": {
        "analysis": {
          "analyzer": {
            "english_analyzer": {
              "type": "english", 
              "stopwords": "['a', 'the', 'they', 'and']" 
            }
          }
        }
      }
    }

2. Reindex

    POST _reindex
    {
      "source": {
        "index": "my_index"
      },
      "dest": {
        "index": "my_new_index"
      }
    }