Run Filebeat on Docker

Docker images for Filebeat are available from the Elastic Docker registry. The base image is centos:7.

A list of all published Docker images and tags is available at www.docker.elastic.co.

These images are free to use under the Elastic license. They contain open source and free commercial features and access to paid commercial features. Start a 30-day trial to try out all of the paid commercial features. See the Subscriptions page for information about Elastic license levels.

Pull the image

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Obtaining Filebeat for Docker is as simple as issuing a docker pull command against the Elastic Docker registry.

docker pull docker.elastic.co/beats/filebeat:8.17.0

Alternatively, you can download other Docker images that contain only features available under the Apache 2.0 license. To download the images, go to www.docker.elastic.co.

Optional: Verify the image

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You can use the Cosign application to verify the Filebeat Docker image signature.

wget https://artifacts.elastic.co/cosign.pub
cosign verify --key cosign.pub docker.elastic.co/beats/filebeat:8.17.0

The cosign command prints the check results and the signature payload in JSON format:

Verification for docker.elastic.co/beats/filebeat:8.17.0 --
The following checks were performed on each of these signatures:
  - The cosign claims were validated
  - Existence of the claims in the transparency log was verified offline
  - The signatures were verified against the specified public key

Run the Filebeat setup

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A known issue in version 8.17.0 prevents Beats Docker images from starting when no options are provided. When running an image on that version, add an --environment container parameter to avoid the problem. This is planned to be addressed in issue #42060.

Running Filebeat with the setup command will create the index pattern and load visualizations , dashboards, and machine learning jobs. Run this command:

docker run --rm \
docker.elastic.co/beats/filebeat:8.17.0 \
setup -E setup.kibana.host=kibana:5601 \
-E output.elasticsearch.hosts=["elasticsearch:9200"]

	Substitute your Kibana and Elasticsearch hosts and ports.
	If you are using the hosted Elasticsearch Service in Elastic Cloud, replace the `-E output.elasticsearch.hosts` line with the Cloud ID and elastic password using this syntax:

-E cloud.id=<Cloud ID from Elasticsearch Service> \
-E cloud.auth=elastic:<elastic password>

Run Filebeat on a read-only file system

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If you’d like to run Filebeat in a Docker container on a read-only file system, you can do so by specifying the --read-only option. Filebeat requires a stateful directory to store application data, so with the --read-only option you also need to use the --mount option to specify a path to where that data can be stored.

For example:

docker run --rm \
  --mount type=bind,source=$(pwd)/data,destination=/usr/share/filebeat/data \
  --read-only \
  docker.elastic.co/beats/filebeat:8.17.0

Configure Filebeat on Docker

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The Docker image provides several methods for configuring Filebeat. The conventional approach is to provide a configuration file via a volume mount, but it’s also possible to create a custom image with your configuration included.

Example configuration file

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Download this example configuration file as a starting point:

curl -L -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/elastic/beats/8.17/deploy/docker/filebeat.docker.yml

Volume-mounted configuration

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One way to configure Filebeat on Docker is to provide filebeat.docker.yml via a volume mount. With docker run, the volume mount can be specified like this.

docker run -d \
  --name=filebeat \
  --user=root \
  --volume="$(pwd)/filebeat.docker.yml:/usr/share/filebeat/filebeat.yml:ro" \
  --volume="/var/lib/docker/containers:/var/lib/docker/containers:ro" \
  --volume="/var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock:ro" \
  --volume="registry:/usr/share/filebeat/data:rw" \
  docker.elastic.co/beats/filebeat:8.17.0 filebeat -e --strict.perms=false \
  -E output.elasticsearch.hosts=["elasticsearch:9200"]

	Substitute your Elasticsearch hosts and ports.
	If you are using the hosted Elasticsearch Service in Elastic Cloud, replace the `-E output.elasticsearch.hosts` line with the Cloud ID and elastic password using the syntax shown earlier.

Customize your configuration

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The filebeat.docker.yml file you downloaded earlier is configured to deploy Beats modules based on the Docker labels applied to your containers. See Hints based autodiscover for more details. Add labels to your application Docker containers, and they will be picked up by the Beats autodiscover feature when they are deployed. Here is an example command for an Apache HTTP Server container with labels to configure the Filebeat and Metricbeat modules for the Apache HTTP Server:

docker run \
  --label co.elastic.logs/module=apache2 \
  --label co.elastic.logs/fileset.stdout=access \
  --label co.elastic.logs/fileset.stderr=error \
  --label co.elastic.metrics/module=apache \
  --label co.elastic.metrics/metricsets=status \
  --label co.elastic.metrics/hosts='${data.host}:${data.port}' \
  --detach=true \
  --name my-apache-app \
  -p 8080:80 \
  httpd:2.4

Custom image configuration

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It’s possible to embed your Filebeat configuration in a custom image. Here is an example Dockerfile to achieve this:

FROM docker.elastic.co/beats/filebeat:8.17.0
COPY --chown=root:filebeat filebeat.yml /usr/share/filebeat/filebeat.yml

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