Installation

Elasticsearch requires at least Java 7. Specifically as of this writing, it is recommended that you use the Oracle JDK version 1.8.0_73. Java installation varies from platform to platform so we won’t go into those details here. Oracle’s recommended installation documentation can be found on Oracle’s website. Suffice to say, before you install Elasticsearch, please check your Java version first by running (and then install/upgrade accordingly if needed):

java -version
echo $JAVA_HOME

Once we have Java set up, we can then download and run Elasticsearch. The binaries are available from www.elastic.co/downloads along with all the releases that have been made in the past. For each release, you have a choice among a zip or tar archive, or a DEB or RPM package. For simplicity, let’s use the tar file.

Let’s download the Elasticsearch 2.3.4 tar as follows (Windows users should download the zip package):

curl -L -O https://download.elastic.co/elasticsearch/release/org/elasticsearch/distribution/tar/elasticsearch/2.3.4/elasticsearch-2.3.4.tar.gz

Then extract it as follows (Windows users should unzip the zip package):

tar -xvf elasticsearch-2.3.4.tar.gz

It will then create a bunch of files and folders in your current directory. We then go into the bin directory as follows:

cd elasticsearch-2.3.4/bin

And now we are ready to start our node and single cluster (Windows users should run the elasticsearch.bat file):

./elasticsearch

If everything goes well, you should see a bunch of messages that look like below:

./elasticsearch
[2014-03-13 13:42:17,218][INFO ][node           ] [New Goblin] version[2.3.4], pid[2085], build[5c03844/2014-02-25T15:52:53Z]
[2014-03-13 13:42:17,219][INFO ][node           ] [New Goblin] initializing ...
[2014-03-13 13:42:17,223][INFO ][plugins        ] [New Goblin] loaded [], sites []
[2014-03-13 13:42:19,831][INFO ][node           ] [New Goblin] initialized
[2014-03-13 13:42:19,832][INFO ][node           ] [New Goblin] starting ...
[2014-03-13 13:42:19,958][INFO ][transport      ] [New Goblin] bound_address {inet[/0:0:0:0:0:0:0:0:9300]}, publish_address {inet[/192.168.8.112:9300]}
[2014-03-13 13:42:23,030][INFO ][cluster.service] [New Goblin] new_master [New Goblin][rWMtGj3dQouz2r6ZFL9v4g][mwubuntu1][inet[/192.168.8.112:9300]], reason: zen-disco-join (elected_as_master)
[2014-03-13 13:42:23,100][INFO ][discovery      ] [New Goblin] elasticsearch/rWMtGj3dQouz2r6ZFL9v4g
[2014-03-13 13:42:23,125][INFO ][http           ] [New Goblin] bound_address {inet[/0:0:0:0:0:0:0:0:9200]}, publish_address {inet[/192.168.8.112:9200]}
[2014-03-13 13:42:23,629][INFO ][gateway        ] [New Goblin] recovered [1] indices into cluster_state
[2014-03-13 13:42:23,630][INFO ][node           ] [New Goblin] started

Without going too much into detail, we can see that our node named "New Goblin" (which will be a different Marvel character in your case) has started and elected itself as a master in a single cluster. Don’t worry yet at the moment what master means. The main thing that is important here is that we have started one node within one cluster.

As mentioned previously, we can override either the cluster or node name. This can be done from the command line when starting Elasticsearch as follows:

./elasticsearch --cluster.name my_cluster_name --node.name my_node_name

Also note the line marked http with information about the HTTP address (192.168.8.112) and port (9200) that our node is reachable from. By default, Elasticsearch uses port 9200 to provide access to its REST API. This port is configurable if necessary.