[role="xpack"]
[[watcher-api-get-settings]]
=== Get Watcher index settings
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<titleabbrev>Get Watcher settings</titleabbrev>
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This API allows a user to retrieve the user-configurable settings for the Watcher internal index (`.watches`). Only a subset of the index settings—those that are user-configurable—will be shown. This includes:

- `index.auto_expand_replicas`
- `index.number_of_replicas`

An example of retrieving the Watcher settings:

[source,console]
-----------------------------------------------------------
GET /_watcher/settings
-----------------------------------------------------------

The configurable settings can be modified using the <<watcher-api-update-settings,Update Watcher index settings>> API.