You can create an index and specify the number of shards and replicas to create:

PUT /catalog
{
  "settings": {
    "index": {
      "number_of_shards": 5,
      "number_of_replicas": 2
    }
  }
}

It is possible to specify a mapping for a type at the time of index creation. The following command will create an index called catalog, with five shards and two replicas. Additionally, it also defines a type called my_type with two fields, one of the text type and another of the keyword type:

PUT /catalog1
{
  "settings": {
    "index": {
      "number_of_shards": 5,
      "number_of_replicas": 2
    }
  },
  "mappings": {
    "properties": {
      "f1": {
        "type": "text"
      },
      "f2": {
        "type": "keyword"
      }
    }
  }
}