registering a custom analyzer and using it in a template

I've been trying to add custom analyzer in elasticsearch with the goal of using it as the default analyzer in an index template. So far, I've been able to get it to work when explicitly defined as the analyzer for a property (when defined inside the template), but not when trying to use it as the default. Here is what I have so far:

Appended to elasticsearch.yml:

### custom analyzer ###
index:
    analysis:
        analyzer:
            custom_whitespace:
                type: standard
                tokenizer: whitespace
                filter: [lowercase]

Elasticsearch starts without error, but when I try to use a template to create an index such as:

{
    "aliases": {},
    "order": 0,
    "settings": {
        "index.analysis.analyzer.default.stopwords": "_none_",
        "index.analysis.analyzer.default.type": "custom_whitespace",
        "index.refresh_interval": "5s"
    },
    "template": "goldstone-*",
    "mappings": {
        "_default_": {
            "_timestamp": {
                "enabled": true,
                "path": "@timestamp"
            },
            "_source": {
                "enabled": true
            },
            "properties": {
                "@timestamp": {
                    "type": "date"
                }

            }
        }
    }
}

An error is generated during index creation:

IndexCreationException[[goldstone-2014.05.05] failed to create index]; nested: ElasticsearchIllegalArgumentException[failed to find analyzer type [custom_whitespace] or tokenizer for [default]]; nested: NoClassSettingsException[Failed to load class setting [type] with value [custom_whitespace]]; nested: ClassNotFoundException[org.elasticsearch.index.analysis.customwhitespace.CustomWhitespaceAnalyzerProvider]

The only way I've been able to successfully register the custom analyzer was to define it in the template, but then I was not able to use it as the default analyzer using the "index.analysis.analyzer.default.type" parameter, only by specifying an explicit analyzer with each property. That configure looks like:

{
    "aliases": {},
    "order": 0,
    "settings": {
        "analysis": {
            "analyzer": {
                "custom_whitespace": {
                    "filter": ["lowercase"],
                    "tokenizer": "whitespace"
                }
            }
        },
        "index.analysis.analyzer.default.stopwords": "_none_",
        "index.analysis.analyzer.default.type": "whitespace",
        "index.refresh_interval": "5s"
    },
    "template": "goldstone-*",
    "mappings": {
        "keystone_service_list": {
            "_timestamp": {
                "enabled": true,
                "path": "@timestamp"
            },
            "_source": {
                "enabled": true
            },
            "properties": {
                "@timestamp": {
                    "type": "date"
                },
                "region": {
                    "type": "string",
                    "analyzer": "custom_whitespace"
                }
            }
        }
   }
}

Any way to define this analyzer so it can be used as the default for all properties of all types in an index template?

You can try dynamic-templates, like:

// only show 'mappings' part
"mappings": {
    "keystone_service_list": {
        "_timestamp": {
                "enabled": true,
                "path": "@timestamp"
            },
            // _source enabled default
            //"_source": {
            //    "enabled": true
            //},
            "dynamic_templates": [
                {
                    "string_fields": {
                        "match": "*",
                        "match_mapping_type": "string",
                        "mapping": {
                            "type": "string",
                            "analyzer": "custom_whitespace"
                        }
                    }
                }
            ]
        }
    }
}

This will adopt 'custom_whitespace' analyzer to all fields which type is string in 'keystone_service_list'.