Common Index Operations

This guide covers operations that are common to both serverless and pod-based indexes.

List indexes

The pc.indexes.list command returns an object with an array of index models:

import { Pinecone } from '@pinecone-database/pinecone';

const pc = new Pinecone({ apiKey: 'YOUR_API_KEY' });

const list = await pc.indexes.list();
console.log(list);
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Describe an index

You can fetch the description of any index by name using pc.indexes.describe. The 2026-07 response carries field definitions under schema and hosting settings under deployment:

import { Pinecone } from '@pinecone-database/pinecone';

const pc = new Pinecone({ apiKey: 'YOUR_API_KEY' });

const indexDescription = await pc.indexes.describe('serverless-index');
console.log(indexDescription.schema);
console.log(indexDescription.deployment);
console.log(indexDescription.status);
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Delete an index

Indexes are deleted by name:

import { Pinecone } from '@pinecone-database/pinecone';

const pc = new Pinecone({ apiKey: 'YOUR_API_KEY' });

await pc.indexes.delete('sample-index');
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Configure an index

Configure serverless indexes

For serverless indexes, you can configure deletion protection, tags:

import { Pinecone } from '@pinecone-database/pinecone';

const pc = new Pinecone({ apiKey: 'YOUR_API_KEY' });

// Enable deletion protection
await pc.indexes.configure('serverless-index', {
  deletionProtection: 'enabled',
});

// Update tags
await pc.indexes.configure('serverless-index', {
  tags: { environment: 'production' },
});

// Delete a tag by setting it to empty string
await pc.indexes.configure('serverless-index', {
  tags: { environment: '' },
});
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Configure pod-based indexes

Note: This section applies to pod-based indexes only. With serverless indexes, you don't configure any compute or storage resources.

You can adjust the number of replicas or scale to a larger pod size (specified with podType). See Scale pod-based indexes. You cannot downgrade pod size or change the base pod type.

import { Pinecone } from '@pinecone-database/pinecone';

const pc = new Pinecone({ apiKey: 'YOUR_API_KEY' });

await pc.indexes.configure('pod-index', {
  podReplicas: 2,
  podType: 'p1.x4',
});

const config = await pc.indexes.describe('pod-index');
console.log(config);
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Deletion protection

You can configure both serverless and pod indexes with deletionProtection. Any index with this property set to 'enabled' will be unable to be deleted. By default, deletionProtection will be set to 'disabled' if not provided as part of the pc.indexes.create request.

To enable deletionProtection you can pass the value while calling pc.indexes.create:

import { Pinecone } from '@pinecone-database/pinecone';

const pc = new Pinecone({ apiKey: 'YOUR_API_KEY' });

await pc.indexes.create({
  name: 'deletion-protected-index',
  dimension: 1536,
  metric: 'cosine',
  deletionProtection: 'enabled',
  spec: {
    serverless: {
      cloud: 'aws',
      region: 'us-west-2',
    },
  },
});
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To disable deletion protection, you can use the pc.indexes.configure operation:

import { Pinecone } from '@pinecone-database/pinecone';

const pc = new Pinecone({ apiKey: 'YOUR_API_KEY' });

await pc.indexes.configure('deletion-protected-index', {
  deletionProtection: 'disabled',
});
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Index tags

You can create or configure serverless and pod indexes with tags. Indexes can hold an arbitrary number of tags outlining metadata you would like attached to the index object itself, such as team ownership, project, or any other relevant information.

import { Pinecone } from '@pinecone-database/pinecone';

const pc = new Pinecone({ apiKey: 'YOUR_API_KEY' });

// Create index with tag
await pc.indexes.create({
  name: 'tag-index',
  dimension: 1536,
  metric: 'cosine',
  spec: {
    serverless: {
      cloud: 'aws',
      region: 'us-west-2',
    },
  },
  tags: { team: 'data-science' },
});

// Configure index with a new tag
await pc.indexes.configure('tag-index', {
  tags: { project: 'recommendation' },
});

// Delete an existing tag (pass empty string to delete)
await pc.indexes.configure('tag-index', {
  tags: { project: '' },
});
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