While playing with https://github.com/jprante/elasticsearch-river-oai I was looking for a method how to restart rivers gracefully, with slightly modified parameters. I found some interesting behavior on a single node cluster.

1. After a river is created, a river can be deleted, and a new river with the same river name can be created without problems.

   curl -XPUT 'localhost:9200/_river/my_river/_meta' -d ' { ... }'
   river runs
   curl -XDELETE 'localhost:9200/_river/my_river/'
   river stops
   curl -XPUT 'localhost:9200/_river/my_river/_meta' -d ' { ... }'
   river runs

2. But when the node is being shutdown after river deletion, and the node is being started up again, there is a response, but no reaction and no activity when re-using the river name.

   curl -XPUT 'localhost:9200/_river/my_river/_meta' -d ' { ... }'
   river runs
   curl -XDELETE 'localhost:9200/_river/my_river/'
   river stops
   node stop
   node start
   curl -XPUT 'localhost:9200/_river/my_river/_meta' -d ' { ... }'
   no river activity

The only workaround I am aware of is to use a different river name, e.g. by enumerating rivers (my_river_1, my_river_2 ...)

Is this behavior intentional? I think it should be possible to re-use a river name in any case.