Breaking changes in 7.8

This section discusses the changes that you need to be aware of when migrating your application to Elasticsearch 7.8.

See also What’s new in 7.9 and Release notes.

License Information changes

As of the 7.8.1 release

Displays Enterprise license as Platinum in /_xpack

Details The GET /_license endpoint displays Enterprise licenses as Platinum by default so that old clients (including Beats, Kibana and Logstash) know to interpret this new license type as if it were a Platinum license.

This compatibility layer was not applied to the GET /_xpack/ endpoint, which also displays a license type and mode. #58217

Aggregation changes

Privilege indices:admin/create will no longer allow the auto creation of indices

Details The privilege named indices:admin/create will no longer allow the auto creation of indices. Use create_index instead. #55858

value_count aggregation optimization

Details Scripts used in value_count will now receive a number if they are counting a numeric field and a GeoPoint if they are counting a geo_point fields. They used to always receive the String representation of those values. #54854

Mappings changes

The enabled mapping parameter cannot be changed for a root mapping.

Details
Mapping requests that attempt to change the enabled mapping parameter for a root mapping will fail and return an error.

Previously, Elasticsearch accepted mapping requests that attempted to change the enabled parameter of the root mapping. Theses changes were not applied, but such requests didn’t return an error.

Impact
To avoid errors, do not submit mapping requests that change the enabled mapping parameter.

The include_in_parent and include_in_root mapping parameters cannot be changed for nested fields.

Details
Mapping requests that attempt to change the include_in_parent or include_in_root mapping parameter for a nested field will fail and return an error.

Previously, Elasticsearch accepted mapping requests that attempted to change the include_in_parent or include_in_root parameter. Theses changes were not applied, but such requests didn’t return an error.

Impact
To avoid errors, do not submit mapping requests that change the include_in_parent or include_in_root mapping parameter.

The get field mapping API’s local query parameter is deprecated.

Details
The get field mapping API‘s local query parameter is deprecated and will be removed in Elasticsearch 8.0.0.

The local parameter is a no-op. The API always retrieves field mappings locally.

Impact
To avoid deprecation warnings, discontinue use of the local parameter.

Settings changes

The node.local_storage setting is deprecated.

Details
The node.local_storage setting is deprecated. In Elasticsearch 8.0.0, all nodes require local storage.

Impact
To avoid deprecation warnings, discontinue use of the node.local_storage setting.

Several X-Pack settings no longer have any effect and are deprecated.

Details
Basic X-Pack license features are always enabled for the default distribution and the following settings no longer have any effect:

  • xpack.enrich.enabled
  • xpack.flattened.enabled
  • xpack.ilm.enabled
  • xpack.monitoring.enabled
  • xpack.rollup.enabled
  • xpack.slm.enabled
  • xpack.sql.enabled
  • xpack.transform.enabled
  • xpack.vectors.enabled

Previously, they could be set to false to disable the feature’s APIs in a cluster.

Impact
To avoid deprecation warnings, discontinue use of these settings. If you have disabled ILM so that you can use another tool to manage Watcher indices, the newly introduced xpack.watcher.use_ilm_index_management setting may be set to false.

Changes to built-in users

The kibana user has been deprecated in favor of the kibana_system user.

Details
The kibana user was historically used to authenticate Kibana to Elasticsearch. The name of this user was confusing, and was often mistakenly used to login to Kibana. We’ve replaced the kibana user with the kibana_system user to reduce confusion and to better align with other built-in system accounts.

Impact
If your kibana.yml used to contain:

  1. elasticsearch.username: kibana

then you should update to use the new kibana_system user instead:

  1. elasticsearch.username: kibana_system

The new kibana_system user does not preserve the previous kibana user password. You must explicitly set a password for the kibana_system user.

Changes to built-in roles

The kibana_user role has been deprecated in favor of the kibana_admin role.

Details
Users who were previously assigned the kibana_user role should instead be assigned the kibana_admin role. This role grants the same set of privileges as kibana_user, but has been renamed to better reflect its intended use.

Impact
Assign users with the kibana_user role to the kibana_admin role. Discontinue use of the kibana_user role.