Starting Elasticsearch
The method for starting Elasticsearch varies depending on how you installed it.
Archive packages (.tar.gz
)
If you installed Elasticsearch with a .tar.gz
package, you can start Elasticsearch from the command line.
Running Elasticsearch from the command line
Elasticsearch can be started from the command line as follows:
./bin/elasticsearch
If you have password-protected the Elasticsearch keystore, you will be prompted to enter the keystore’s password. See Secure settings for more details.
By default, Elasticsearch runs in the foreground, prints its logs to the standard output (stdout
), and can be stopped by pressing Ctrl-C
.
All scripts packaged with Elasticsearch require a version of Bash that supports arrays and assume that Bash is available at /bin/bash
. As such, Bash should be available at this path either directly or via a symbolic link.
Running as a daemon
To run Elasticsearch as a daemon, specify -d
on the command line, and record the process ID in a file using the -p
option:
./bin/elasticsearch -d -p pid
If you have password-protected the Elasticsearch keystore, you will be prompted to enter the keystore’s password. See Secure settings for more details.
Log messages can be found in the $ES_HOME/logs/
directory.
To shut down Elasticsearch, kill the process ID recorded in the pid
file:
pkill -F pid
The startup scripts provided in the RPM and Debian packages take care of starting and stopping the Elasticsearch process for you.
Archive packages (.zip
)
If you installed Elasticsearch on Windows with a .zip
package, you can start Elasticsearch from the command line. If you want Elasticsearch to start automatically at boot time without any user interaction, install Elasticsearch as a service.
Running Elasticsearch from the command line
Elasticsearch can be started from the command line as follows:
.\bin\elasticsearch.bat
If you have password-protected the Elasticsearch keystore, you will be prompted to enter the keystore’s password. See Secure settings for more details.
By default, Elasticsearch runs in the foreground, prints its logs to STDOUT
, and can be stopped by pressing Ctrl-C
.
Debian packages
Elasticsearch is not started automatically after installation. How to start and stop Elasticsearch depends on whether your system uses SysV init
or systemd
(used by newer distributions). You can tell which is being used by running this command:
ps -p 1
Running Elasticsearch with SysV init
Use the update-rc.d
command to configure Elasticsearch to start automatically when the system boots up:
sudo update-rc.d elasticsearch defaults 95 10
Elasticsearch can be started and stopped using the service
command:
sudo -i service elasticsearch start
sudo -i service elasticsearch stop
If Elasticsearch fails to start for any reason, it will print the reason for failure to STDOUT. Log files can be found in /var/log/elasticsearch/
.
Running Elasticsearch with systemd
To configure Elasticsearch to start automatically when the system boots up, run the following commands:
sudo /bin/systemctl daemon-reload
sudo /bin/systemctl enable elasticsearch.service
Elasticsearch can be started and stopped as follows:
sudo systemctl start elasticsearch.service
sudo systemctl stop elasticsearch.service
These commands provide no feedback as to whether Elasticsearch was started successfully or not. Instead, this information will be written in the log files located in /var/log/elasticsearch/
.
If you have password-protected your Elasticsearch keystore, you will need to provide systemd
with the keystore password using a local file and systemd environment variables. This local file should be protected while it exists and may be safely deleted once Elasticsearch is up and running.
echo "keystore_password" > /path/to/my_pwd_file.tmp
chmod 600 /path/to/my_pwd_file.tmp
sudo systemctl set-environment ES_KEYSTORE_PASSPHRASE_FILE=/path/to/my_pwd_file.tmp
sudo systemctl start elasticsearch.service
By default the Elasticsearch service doesn’t log information in the systemd
journal. To enable journalctl
logging, the --quiet
option must be removed from the ExecStart
command line in the elasticsearch.service
file.
When systemd
logging is enabled, the logging information are available using the journalctl
commands:
To tail the journal:
sudo journalctl -f
To list journal entries for the elasticsearch service:
sudo journalctl --unit elasticsearch
To list journal entries for the elasticsearch service starting from a given time:
sudo journalctl --unit elasticsearch --since "2016-10-30 18:17:16"
Check man journalctl
or https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/journalctl.html for more command line options.
Docker images
If you installed a Docker image, you can start Elasticsearch from the command line. There are different methods depending on whether you’re using development mode or production mode. See Docker Run.
MSI packages
If you installed Elasticsearch on Windows using the .msi
package, you can start Elasticsearch from the command line. If you want it to start automatically at boot time without any user interaction, install Elasticsearch as a Windows service.
Running Elasticsearch from the command line
Once installed, Elasticsearch can be started from the command line, if not installed as a service and configured to start when installation completes, as follows:
.\bin\elasticsearch.exe
The command line terminal will display output similar to the following:
By default, Elasticsearch runs in the foreground, prints its logs to STDOUT
in addition to the <cluster name>.log
file within LOGSDIRECTORY
, and can be stopped by pressing Ctrl-C
.
RPM packages
Elasticsearch is not started automatically after installation. How to start and stop Elasticsearch depends on whether your system uses SysV init
or systemd
(used by newer distributions). You can tell which is being used by running this command:
ps -p 1
Running Elasticsearch with SysV init
Use the chkconfig
command to configure Elasticsearch to start automatically when the system boots up:
sudo chkconfig --add elasticsearch
Elasticsearch can be started and stopped using the service
command:
sudo -i service elasticsearch start
sudo -i service elasticsearch stop
If Elasticsearch fails to start for any reason, it will print the reason for failure to STDOUT. Log files can be found in /var/log/elasticsearch/
.
Running Elasticsearch with systemd
To configure Elasticsearch to start automatically when the system boots up, run the following commands:
sudo /bin/systemctl daemon-reload
sudo /bin/systemctl enable elasticsearch.service
Elasticsearch can be started and stopped as follows:
sudo systemctl start elasticsearch.service
sudo systemctl stop elasticsearch.service
These commands provide no feedback as to whether Elasticsearch was started successfully or not. Instead, this information will be written in the log files located in /var/log/elasticsearch/
.
If you have password-protected your Elasticsearch keystore, you will need to provide systemd
with the keystore password using a local file and systemd environment variables. This local file should be protected while it exists and may be safely deleted once Elasticsearch is up and running.
echo "keystore_password" > /path/to/my_pwd_file.tmp
chmod 600 /path/to/my_pwd_file.tmp
sudo systemctl set-environment ES_KEYSTORE_PASSPHRASE_FILE=/path/to/my_pwd_file.tmp
sudo systemctl start elasticsearch.service
By default the Elasticsearch service doesn’t log information in the systemd
journal. To enable journalctl
logging, the --quiet
option must be removed from the ExecStart
command line in the elasticsearch.service
file.
When systemd
logging is enabled, the logging information are available using the journalctl
commands:
To tail the journal:
sudo journalctl -f
To list journal entries for the elasticsearch service:
sudo journalctl --unit elasticsearch
To list journal entries for the elasticsearch service starting from a given time:
sudo journalctl --unit elasticsearch --since "2016-10-30 18:17:16"
Check man journalctl
or https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/journalctl.html for more command line options.