- Install Elasticsearch In Docker Command
- Install Elasticsearch In Docker Kubernetes
- Install Elasticsearch Kibana Docker
- Install Elasticsearch In Docker Cli
Elasticsearch is a powerful open source search and analytics engine that makes data easy to explore. Dec 14, 2020 failed to start daemon: pid file found, ensure docker is not running or delete /var/run/docker.pid. So looks like either an instance of docker is running, or /var/run/docker.pid was not removed when the docker service was stopped; for the first case; did you perhaps install a distro-package or the docker 'snap' before?
Elasticsearch is also available as Docker images.The images use centos:8 as the base image.
A list of all published Docker images and tags is available atwww.docker.elastic.co. The source filesare inGithub.
This package contains both free and subscription features.Start a 30-day trial to try out all of the features.
Obtaining Elasticsearch for Docker is as simple as issuing a docker pull
commandagainst the Elastic Docker registry.
To start a single-node Elasticsearch cluster for development or testing, specifysingle-node discovery to bypass the bootstrap checks:
Starting a multi-node cluster with Docker Composeedit
To get a three-node Elasticsearch cluster up and running in Docker,you can use Docker Compose:
This sample docker-compose.yml
file uses the ES_JAVA_OPTS
environment variable to manually set the heap size to 512MB. We do not recommendusing ES_JAVA_OPTS
in production. See Manually set the heap size.
This sample Docker Compose file brings up a three-node Elasticsearch cluster.Node es01
listens on localhost:9200
and es02
and es03
talk to es01
over a Docker network.
Please note that this configuration exposes port 9200 on all network interfaces, and given howDocker manipulates iptables
on Linux, this means that your Elasticsearch cluster is publically accessible,potentially ignoring any firewall settings. If you don’t want to expose port 9200 and instead usea reverse proxy, replace 9200:9200
with 127.0.0.1:9200:9200
in the docker-compose.yml file.Elasticsearch will then only be accessible from the host machine itself.
The Docker named volumesdata01
, data02
, and data03
store the node data directories so the data persists across restarts.If they don’t already exist, docker-compose
creates them when you bring up the cluster.
Make sure Docker Engine is allotted at least 4GiB of memory.In Docker Desktop, you configure resource usage on the Advanced tab in Preference (macOS)or Settings (Windows).
Docker Compose is not pre-installed with Docker on Linux.See docs.docker.com for installation instructions:Install Compose on Linux
Run
docker-compose
to bring up the cluster:Submit a
_cat/nodes
request to see that the nodes are up and running:
Log messages go to the console and are handled by the configured Docker logging driver.By default you can access logs with docker logs
. If you would prefer the Elasticsearchcontainer to write logs to disk, set the ES_LOG_STYLE
environment variable to file
.This causes Elasticsearch to use the same logging configuration as other Elasticsearch distribution formats.
To stop the cluster, run docker-compose down
.The data in the Docker volumes is preserved and loadedwhen you restart the cluster with docker-compose up
.To delete the data volumes when you bring down the cluster,specify the -v
option: docker-compose down -v
.
See Encrypting communications in an Elasticsearch Docker Container andRun the Elastic Stack in Docker with TLS enabled.
The following requirements and recommendations apply when running Elasticsearch in Docker in production.
The vm.max_map_count
kernel setting must be set to at least 262144
for production use.
How you set vm.max_map_count
depends on your platform:
Linux
The
vm.max_map_count
setting should be set permanently in/etc/sysctl.conf
:To apply the setting on a live system, run:
macOS with Docker for Mac
The
vm.max_map_count
setting must be set within the xhyve virtual machine:From the command line, run:
Press enter and use`sysctl` to configure
vm.max_map_count
:- To exit the
screen
session, typeCtrl a d
.
Windows and macOS with Docker Desktop
The
vm.max_map_count
setting must be set via docker-machine:Windows with Docker Desktop WSL 2 backend
The
vm.max_map_count
setting must be set in the docker-desktop container:
Configuration files must be readable by the elasticsearch
useredit
By default, Elasticsearch runs inside the container as user elasticsearch
usinguid:gid 1000:0
.
One exception is Openshift,which runs containers using an arbitrarily assigned user ID.Openshift presents persistent volumes with the gid set to 0
, which works without any adjustments.
If you are bind-mounting a local directory or file, it must be readable by the elasticsearch
user.In addition, this user must have write access to the config, data and log dirs(Elasticsearch needs write access to the config
directory so that it can generate a keystore).A good strategy is to grant group access to gid 0
for the local directory.
For example, to prepare a local directory for storing data through a bind-mount:
You can also run an Elasticsearch container using both a custom UID and GID. Unless youbind-mount each of the config
, data` and logs
directories, you must passthe command line option --group-add 0
to docker run
. This ensures that the userunder which Elasticsearch is running is also a member of the root
(GID 0) group inside thecontainer.
As a last resort, you can force the container to mutate the ownership ofany bind-mounts used for the data and log dirs through theenvironment variable TAKE_FILE_OWNERSHIP
. When you do this, they will be owned byuid:gid 1000:0
, which provides the required read/write access to the Elasticsearch process.
Increased ulimits for nofile and nprocmust be available for the Elasticsearch containers.Verify the init systemfor the Docker daemon sets them to acceptable values.
To check the Docker daemon defaults for ulimits, run:
If needed, adjust them in the Daemon or override them per container.For example, when using docker run
, set:
Swapping needs to be disabled for performance and node stability.For information about ways to do this, see Disable swapping.
If you opt for the bootstrap.memory_lock: true
approach,you also need to define the memlock: true
ulimit in theDocker Daemon,or explicitly set for the container as shown in the sample compose file.When using docker run
, you can specify:
The image exposesTCP ports 9200 and 9300. For production clusters, randomizing thepublished ports with --publish-all
is recommended,unless you are pinning one container per host.
By default, Elasticsearch automatically sizes JVM heap based on a nodes’sroles and the total memory available to the node’s container. Werecommend this default sizing for most production environments. If needed, youcan override default sizing by manually setting JVM heap size.
To manually set the heap size in production, bind mount a JVMoptions file under /usr/share/elasticsearch/config/jvm.options.d
thatincludes your desired heap size settings.
For testing, you can also manually set the heap size using the ES_JAVA_OPTS
environment variable. For example, to use 16GB, specify -eES_JAVA_OPTS='-Xms16g -Xmx16g'
with docker run
. The ES_JAVA_OPTS
variableoverrides all other JVM options. The ES_JAVA_OPTS
variable overrides all otherJVM options. We do not recommend using ES_JAVA_OPTS
in production. Thedocker-compose.yml
file above sets the heap size to 512MB.
Pin your deployments to a specific version of the Elasticsearch Docker image. Forexample docker.elastic.co/elasticsearch/elasticsearch:7.12.0
.
You should use a volume bound on /usr/share/elasticsearch/data
for the following reasons:
- The data of your Elasticsearch node won’t be lost if the container is killed
- Elasticsearch is I/O sensitive and the Docker storage driver is not ideal for fast I/O
- It allows the use of advancedDocker volume plugins
If you are using the devicemapper storage driver, do not use the default loop-lvm
mode.Configure docker-engine to usedirect-lvm.
Consider centralizing your logs by using a differentlogging driver. Alsonote that the default json-file logging driver is not ideally suited forproduction use.
When you run in Docker, the Elasticsearch configuration files are loaded from/usr/share/elasticsearch/config/
.
To use custom configuration files, you bind-mount the filesover the configuration files in the image.
You can set individual Elasticsearch configuration parameters using Docker environment variables.The sample compose file and thesingle-node example use this method.
To use the contents of a file to set an environment variable, suffix the environmentvariable name with _FILE
. This is useful for passing secrets such as passwords to Elasticsearchwithout specifying them directly.
For example, to set the Elasticsearch bootstrap password from a file, you can bind mount thefile and set the ELASTIC_PASSWORD_FILE
environment variable to the mount location.If you mount the password file to /run/secrets/bootstrapPassword.txt
, specify:
You can also override the default command for the image to pass Elasticsearch configurationparameters as command line options. For example:
While bind-mounting your configuration files is usually the preferred method in production,you can also create a custom Docker imagethat contains your configuration.
Create custom config files and bind-mount them over the corresponding files in the Docker image.For example, to bind-mount custom_elasticsearch.yml
with docker run
, specify:
The container runs Elasticsearch as user elasticsearch
usinguid:gid 1000:0
. Bind mounted host directories and files must be accessible by this user,and the data and log directories must be writable by this user.
By default, Elasticsearch will auto-generate a keystore file for secure settings. Thisfile is obfuscated but not encrypted. If you want to encrypt yoursecure settings with a password, you must use theelasticsearch-keystore
utility to create a password-protected keystore andbind-mount it to the container as/usr/share/elasticsearch/config/elasticsearch.keystore
. In order to providethe Docker container with the password at startup, set the Docker environmentvalue KEYSTORE_PASSWORD
to the value of your password. For example, a dockerrun
command might have the following options:
In some environments, it might make more sense to prepare a custom image that containsyour configuration. A Dockerfile
to achieve this might be as simple as:
You could then build and run the image with:
Some plugins require additional security permissions.You must explicitly accept them either by:
- Attaching a
tty
when you run the Docker image and allowing the permissions when prompted. - Inspecting the security permissions and accepting them (if appropriate) by adding the
--batch
flag to the plugin install command.
See Plugin managementfor more information.
Install Elasticsearch In Docker Command
You now have a test Elasticsearch environment set up. Before you startserious development or go into production with Elasticsearch, you must do some additionalsetup:
- Learn how to configure Elasticsearch.
- Configure important Elasticsearch settings.
- Configure important system settings.
Most Popular
Elasticsearch is also available as Docker images. Starting with version 8.0.0, theseare based upon a tiny core of essential files. Prior versions usedcentos:8 as the base image.
A list of all published Docker images and tags is available atwww.docker.elastic.co. The source filesare inGithub.
This package contains both free and subscription features.Start a 30-day trial to try out all of the features.
Obtaining Elasticsearch for Docker is as simple as issuing a docker pull
commandagainst the Elastic Docker registry.
Version 8.0.0 of Elasticsearch has not yet been released, so noDocker image is currently available for this version.
Version 8.0.0 of the Elasticsearch Docker image has not yet been released.
Starting a multi-node cluster with Docker Composeedit
To get a three-node Elasticsearch cluster up and running in Docker,you can use Docker Compose:
Create a
docker-compose.yml
file:Version 8.0.0 of Elasticsearch has not yet been released, so a
docker-compose.yml
is not available for this version.This sample
docker-compose.yml
file uses theES_JAVA_OPTS
environment variable to manually set the heap size to 512MB. We do not recommendusingES_JAVA_OPTS
in production. See Manually set the heap size.This sample Docker Compose file brings up a three-node Elasticsearch cluster.Node
es01
listens onlocalhost:9200
andes02
andes03
talk toes01
over a Docker network.Please note that this configuration exposes port 9200 on all network interfaces, and given howDocker manipulates
iptables
on Linux, this means that your Elasticsearch cluster is publicly accessible,potentially ignoring any firewall settings. If you don’t want to expose port 9200 and instead usea reverse proxy, replace9200:9200
with127.0.0.1:9200:9200
in the docker-compose.yml file.Elasticsearch will then only be accessible from the host machine itself.The Docker named volumes
data01
,data02
, anddata03
store the node data directories so the data persists across restarts.If they don’t already exist,docker-compose
creates them when you bring up the cluster.Make sure Docker Engine is allotted at least 4GiB of memory.In Docker Desktop, you configure resource usage on the Advanced tab in Preference (macOS)or Settings (Windows).
Docker Compose is not pre-installed with Docker on Linux.See docs.docker.com for installation instructions:Install Compose on Linux
Run
docker-compose
to bring up the cluster:Submit a
_cat/nodes
request to see that the nodes are up and running:
Log messages go to the console and are handled by the configured Docker logging driver.By default you can access logs with docker logs
. If you would prefer the Elasticsearchcontainer to write logs to disk, set the ES_LOG_STYLE
environment variable to file
.This causes Elasticsearch to use the same logging configuration as other Elasticsearch distribution formats.
To stop the cluster, run docker-compose down
.The data in the Docker volumes is preserved and loadedwhen you restart the cluster with docker-compose up
.To delete the data volumes when you bring down the cluster,specify the -v
option: docker-compose down -v
.
See Encrypting communications in an Elasticsearch Docker Container andRun the Elastic Stack in Docker with TLS enabled.
The following requirements and recommendations apply when running Elasticsearch in Docker in production.
The vm.max_map_count
kernel setting must be set to at least 262144
for production use.
How you set vm.max_map_count
depends on your platform:
Linux
The
vm.max_map_count
setting should be set permanently in/etc/sysctl.conf
:To apply the setting on a live system, run:
macOS with Docker for Mac
The
vm.max_map_count
setting must be set within the xhyve virtual machine:From the command line, run:
Press enter and use`sysctl` to configure
vm.max_map_count
:- To exit the
screen
session, typeCtrl a d
.
Windows and macOS with Docker Desktop
The
vm.max_map_count
setting must be set via docker-machine:Windows with Docker Desktop WSL 2 backend
The
vm.max_map_count
setting must be set in the docker-desktop container:
Configuration files must be readable by the elasticsearch
useredit
By default, Elasticsearch runs inside the container as user elasticsearch
usinguid:gid 1000:0
.
One exception is Openshift,which runs containers using an arbitrarily assigned user ID.Openshift presents persistent volumes with the gid set to 0
, which works without any adjustments.
If you are bind-mounting a local directory or file, it must be readable by the elasticsearch
user.In addition, this user must have write access to the config, data and log dirs(Elasticsearch needs write access to the config
directory so that it can generate a keystore).A good strategy is to grant group access to gid 0
for the local directory.
For example, to prepare a local directory for storing data through a bind-mount:
You can also run an Elasticsearch container using both a custom UID and GID. Unless youbind-mount each of the config
, data
and logs
directories, you must passthe command line option --group-add 0
to docker run
. This ensures that the userunder which Elasticsearch is running is also a member of the root
(GID 0) group inside thecontainer.
Increased ulimits for nofile and nprocmust be available for the Elasticsearch containers.Verify the init systemfor the Docker daemon sets them to acceptable values.
To check the Docker daemon defaults for ulimits, run:
If needed, adjust them in the Daemon or override them per container.For example, when using docker run
, set:
Swapping needs to be disabled for performance and node stability.For information about ways to do this, see Disable swapping.
If you opt for the bootstrap.memory_lock: true
approach,you also need to define the memlock: true
ulimit in theDocker Daemon,or explicitly set for the container as shown in the sample compose file.When using docker run
, you can specify:
The image exposesTCP ports 9200 and 9300. For production clusters, randomizing thepublished ports with --publish-all
is recommended,unless you are pinning one container per host.
By default, Elasticsearch automatically sizes JVM heap based on a nodes’sroles and the total memory available to the node’s container. Werecommend this default sizing for most production environments. If needed, youcan override default sizing by manually setting JVM heap size.
To manually set the heap size in production, bind mount a JVMoptions file under /usr/share/elasticsearch/config/jvm.options.d
thatincludes your desired heap size settings.
For testing, you can also manually set the heap size using the ES_JAVA_OPTS
environment variable. For example, to use 16GB, specify -eES_JAVA_OPTS='-Xms16g -Xmx16g'
with docker run
. The ES_JAVA_OPTS
variableoverrides all other JVM options. The ES_JAVA_OPTS
variable overrides all otherJVM options. We do not recommend using ES_JAVA_OPTS
in production. Thedocker-compose.yml
file above sets the heap size to 512MB.
Pin your deployments to a specific version of the Elasticsearch Docker image. Forexample docker.elastic.co/elasticsearch/elasticsearch:8.0.0
.
You should use a volume bound on /usr/share/elasticsearch/data
for the following reasons:
- The data of your Elasticsearch node won’t be lost if the container is killed
- Elasticsearch is I/O sensitive and the Docker storage driver is not ideal for fast I/O
- It allows the use of advancedDocker volume plugins
If you are using the devicemapper storage driver, do not use the default loop-lvm
mode.Configure docker-engine to usedirect-lvm.
Consider centralizing your logs by using a differentlogging driver. Alsonote that the default json-file logging driver is not ideally suited forproduction use.
When you run in Docker, the Elasticsearch configuration files are loaded from/usr/share/elasticsearch/config/
.
To use custom configuration files, you bind-mount the filesover the configuration files in the image.
Install Elasticsearch In Docker Kubernetes
You can set individual Elasticsearch configuration parameters using Docker environment variables.The sample compose file and thesingle-node example use this method.
To use the contents of a file to set an environment variable, suffix the environmentvariable name with _FILE
. This is useful for passing secrets such as passwords to Elasticsearchwithout specifying them directly.
For example, to set the Elasticsearch bootstrap password from a file, you can bind mount thefile and set the ELASTIC_PASSWORD_FILE
environment variable to the mount location.If you mount the password file to /run/secrets/bootstrapPassword.txt
, specify:
You can also override the default command for the image to pass Elasticsearch configurationparameters as command line options. For example:
While bind-mounting your configuration files is usually the preferred method in production,you can also create a custom Docker imagethat contains your configuration.
Create custom config files and bind-mount them over the corresponding files in the Docker image.For example, to bind-mount custom_elasticsearch.yml
with docker run
, specify:
The container runs Elasticsearch as user elasticsearch
usinguid:gid 1000:0
. Bind mounted host directories and files must be accessible by this user,and the data and log directories must be writable by this user.
By default, Elasticsearch will auto-generate a keystore file for secure settings. Thisfile is obfuscated but not encrypted. If you want to encrypt yoursecure settings with a password, you must use theelasticsearch-keystore
utility to create a password-protected keystore andbind-mount it to the container as/usr/share/elasticsearch/config/elasticsearch.keystore
. In order to providethe Docker container with the password at startup, set the Docker environmentvalue KEYSTORE_PASSWORD
to the value of your password. For example, a dockerrun
command might have the following options:
In some environments, it might make more sense to prepare a custom image that containsyour configuration. A Dockerfile
to achieve this might be as simple as:
You could then build and run the image with:
Some plugins require additional security permissions.You must explicitly accept them either by:
- Attaching a
tty
when you run the Docker image and allowing the permissions when prompted. - Inspecting the security permissions and accepting them (if appropriate) by adding the
--batch
flag to the plugin install command.
See Plugin managementfor more information.
The Elasticsearch Docker image only includes what is required to run Elasticsearch, and doesnot provide a package manager. It is possible to add additional utilitieswith a multi-phase Docker build. You must also copy any dependencies, forexample shared libraries.
You should use centos:8
as a base in order to avoid incompatibilities.Use ldd
to list theshared libraries required by a utility.
You now have a test Elasticsearch environment set up. Before you startserious development or go into production with Elasticsearch, you must do some additionalsetup:
- Learn how to configure Elasticsearch.
- Configure important Elasticsearch settings.
- Configure important system settings.