10_Installing_ES.asciidoc

Installing Elasticsearch

The easiest way to understand what Elasticsearch can do for you is to play with it, so let’s get started!

The only requirement for installing Elasticsearch is a recent version of Java. Preferably, you should install the latest version of the official Java from www.java.com.

You can get the latest version of Elasticsearch from elastic.co/downloads/elasticsearch.

To install Elasticsearch, download and extract the archive file for your platform. For more information, see the {ref}/_installation.html[Installation] topic in the Elasticsearch Reference.

Tip	When installing Elasticsearch in production, you can choose to use the Debian or RPM packages provided on the downloads page. You can also use the officially supported Puppet module or Chef cookbook.

Installing Marvel

Marvel is a management and monitoring tool for Elasticsearch, which is free for development use. It comes with an interactive console called Sense, which makes it easy to talk to Elasticsearch directly from your browser.

Many of the code examples in the online version of this book include a View in Sense link. When clicked, it will open up a working example of the code in the Sense console. You do not have to install Marvel, but it will make this book much more interactive by allowing you to experiment with the code samples on your local Elasticsearch cluster.

Marvel is available as a plug-in. To download and install it, run this command in the Elasticsearch directory:

./bin/plugin -i elasticsearch/marvel/latest

Marvel can also be installed using a {marvel-13}installation.html[manual process] if you don’t have internet connectivity.

You probably don’t want Marvel to monitor your local cluster, so you can disable data collection with this command:

echo 'marvel.agent.enabled: false' >> ./config/elasticsearch.yml

Running Elasticsearch

Elasticsearch is now ready to run. To start it up in the foreground:

cd elasticsearch-<version>
./bin/elasticsearch (1) (2)

1. Add -d if you want to run it in the background as a daemon.

2. If you’re running Elasticsearch on Windows, simply run bin\elasticsearch.bat instead.

Test it out by opening another terminal window and running the following:

curl 'http://localhost:9200/?pretty'

Tip	If you’re running Elasticsearch on Windows, you can download cURL from http://curl.haxx.se/download.html. cURL provides a convenient way to submit requests to Elasticsearch and installing cURL enables you to copy and paste many of the examples in this book to try them out.

You should see a response like this:

{
   "status": 200,
   "name": "Shrunken Bones",
   "version": {
      "number": "1.4.0",
      "lucene_version": "4.10"
   },
   "tagline": "You Know, for Search"
}

This means that your Elasticsearch cluster is up and running, and we can start experimenting with it.

Note	A node is a running instance of Elasticsearch. A cluster is a group of nodes with the same cluster.name that are working together to share data and to provide failover and scale, although a single node can form a cluster all by itself.

You should change the default cluster.name to something appropriate to you, like your own name, to stop your nodes from trying to join another cluster on the same network with the same name!

You can do this by editing the elasticsearch.yml file in the config/ directory and then restarting Elasticsearch. When Elasticsearch is running in the foreground, you can stop it by pressing Ctrl-C; otherwise, you can shut it down with the shutdown API:

curl -XPOST 'http://localhost:9200/_shutdown'

Viewing Marvel and Sense

If you installed the Marvel management and monitoring tool, you can view it in a web browser by visiting http://localhost:9200/_plugin/marvel/.

You can reach the Sense developer console either by clicking the ``Marvel dashboards'' drop-down in Marvel, or by visiting http://localhost:9200/_plugin/marvel/sense/.