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Directory Layout

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Directory Layout

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The directory layout of an installation is as follows:

Type	Description	Default Location	Setting
home	Home of elasticsearch installation		`path.home`
bin	Binary scripts including `elasticsearch` to start a node	`{path.home}/bin`
conf	Configuration files including `elasticsearch.yml`	`{path.home}/config`	`path.conf`
data	The location of the data files of each index / shard allocated on the node. Can hold multiple locations.	`{path.home}/data`	`path.data`
work	Temporal files that are used by different nodes.	`{path.home}/work`	`path.work`
logs	Log files location	`{path.home}/logs`	`path.logs`
plugins	Plugin files location. Each plugin will be contained in a subdirectory.	`{path.home}/plugins`	`path.plugins`

The multiple data locations allows to stripe it. The striping is simple, placing whole files in one of the locations, and deciding where to place the file based on the value of the index.store.distributor setting:

least_used (default) always selects the directory with the most available space
random selects directories at random. The probability of selecting a particular directory is proportional to amount of available space in this directory.

Note, there are no multiple copies of the same data, in that, its similar to RAID 0. Though simple, it should provide a good solution for people that don’t want to mess with RAID. Here is how it is configured:

path.data: /mnt/first,/mnt/second

Or the in an array format:

path.data: ["/mnt/first", "/mnt/second"]

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