Elasticsearch change field date format

You cannot change field mappings after you have indexed documents into Elasticsearch. You can add new fields but you cannot change existing fields.

You could create a new index with the new mappings and then re-index all the data into it. You could then delete the old index and create a new index alias with the old name point to the new index.

There are a few strategies documented for minimizing downtime when changing mappings in the Elasticsearch blog: https://www.elastic.co/blog/changing-mapping-with-zero-downtime

Overall I'd highly suggest using index aliases - they provide a high level of abstraction and flexibility over using index names directly within your application. Perfect for situations like this where you want to make a change to the underlying index: http://www.elasticsearch.org/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/current/indices-aliases.html

You can update format mapping on an existing date field with the PUT mapping API:

PUT twitter/_mapping/user 
{
  "properties": {
    "myDate": {
      "format": "dd-MM-yyyy HH:mm:ss"
    }
  }
}

format is one of the few mappings that can be updated on existing fields without losing data

https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/2.0/mapping-date-format.html

For elastic version <7.0 where mapping type is not deprecated

you can use something like this

PUT inf/_mapping/_doc 
{
  "properties": {
    "ChargeDate": {
      "type":"date",
      "format": "dd-MM-yyyy HH:mm:ss"
    }
  }
}

where inf is your index and _doc is mapping type(which is deprecated in v >7.0)

or

PUT inf
{
  "mappings": {
    "_doc": {
      "properties": {
        "ChargeDate": {
         "type":"date",
      "format": "dd-MM-yyyy HH:mm:ss"
        }
      }
    }
  }
}