Index autocreation never creates the index properly. The mailing list tells to to turn off a few other things too:

2. Require explicit index creation ##

action.auto_create_index: false

2. Protect against accidental close/delete operations
3. on all indices. You can still close/delete individual
4. indices ##

action.disable_close_all_indices: true
action.disable_delete_all_indices: true

2. Disable ability to shutdown nodes via REST API ##

action.disable_shutdown: true

Which all sound good to me. This bug tracks both updating CirrusSearch's README about these and WMF's puppet repository. Also, I'll be testing turning all of these off and making sure CirrusSearch doesn't complain back to the user if the index isn't created yet.

Version: unspecified
Severity: normal