Install Elasticsearch with Docker
Elasticsearch is also available as Docker images. The images use centos:7 as the base image.
A list of all published Docker images and tags is available at www.docker.elastic.co. The source files are in Github.
These images are free to use under the Elastic license. They contain open source and free commercial features and access to paid commercial features. Start a 30-day trial to try out all of the paid commercial features. See the Subscriptions page for information about Elastic license levels.
Obtaining Elasticsearch for Docker is as simple as issuing a docker pull
command against the Elastic Docker registry.
docker pull docker.elastic.co/elasticsearch/elasticsearch:7.6.2
Alternatively, you can download other Docker images that contain only features available under the Apache 2.0 license. To download the images, go to www.docker.elastic.co.
To start a single-node Elasticsearch cluster for development or testing, specify single-node discovery to bypass the bootstrap checks:
docker run -p 9200:9200 -p 9300:9300 -e "discovery.type=single-node" docker.elastic.co/elasticsearch/elasticsearch:7.6.2
To get a three-node Elasticsearch cluster up and running in Docker, you can use Docker Compose:
- Create a
docker-compose.yml
file:
version: '2.2'
services:
es01:
image: docker.elastic.co/elasticsearch/elasticsearch:7.6.2
container_name: es01
environment:
- node.name=es01
- cluster.name=es-docker-cluster
- discovery.seed_hosts=es02,es03
- cluster.initial_master_nodes=es01,es02,es03
- bootstrap.memory_lock=true
- "ES_JAVA_OPTS=-Xms512m -Xmx512m"
ulimits:
memlock:
soft: -1
hard: -1
volumes:
- data01:/usr/share/elasticsearch/data
ports:
- 9200:9200
networks:
- elastic
es02:
image: docker.elastic.co/elasticsearch/elasticsearch:7.6.2
container_name: es02
environment:
- node.name=es02
- cluster.name=es-docker-cluster
- discovery.seed_hosts=es01,es03
- cluster.initial_master_nodes=es01,es02,es03
- bootstrap.memory_lock=true
- "ES_JAVA_OPTS=-Xms512m -Xmx512m"
ulimits:
memlock:
soft: -1
hard: -1
volumes:
- data02:/usr/share/elasticsearch/data
networks:
- elastic
es03:
image: docker.elastic.co/elasticsearch/elasticsearch:7.6.2
container_name: es03
environment:
- node.name=es03
- cluster.name=es-docker-cluster
- discovery.seed_hosts=es01,es02
- cluster.initial_master_nodes=es01,es02,es03
- bootstrap.memory_lock=true
- "ES_JAVA_OPTS=-Xms512m -Xmx512m"
ulimits:
memlock:
soft: -1
hard: -1
volumes:
- data03:/usr/share/elasticsearch/data
networks:
- elastic
volumes:
data01:
driver: local
data02:
driver: local
data03:
driver: local
networks:
elastic:
driver: bridge
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 how Docker 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 use a 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 volumes data01
, 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:docker-compose up
-
Submit a
_cat/nodes
request to see that the nodes are up and running:curl -X GET "localhost:9200/_cat/nodes?v&pretty"
Log messages go to the console and are handled by the configured Docker logging driver. By default you can access logs with docker logs
.
To stop the cluster, run docker-compose down
. The data in the Docker volumes is preserved and loaded when 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
.
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
:grep vm.max_map_count /etc/sysctl.conf vm.max_map_count=262144
To apply the setting on a live system, run:
sysctl -w vm.max_map_count=262144
-
macOS with Docker for Mac
The
vm.max_map_count
setting must be set within the xhyve virtual machine:-
From the command line, run:
screen ~/Library/Containers/com.docker.docker/Data/vms/0/tty
-
Press enter and use`sysctl` to configure
vm.max_map_count
:sysctl -w vm.max_map_count=262144
- 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:docker-machine ssh sudo sysctl -w vm.max_map_count=262144
By default, Elasticsearch runs inside the container as user elasticsearch
using uid: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 data and log dirs. 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:
mkdir esdatadir
chmod g+rwx esdatadir
chgrp 0 esdatadir
As a last resort, you can force the container to mutate the ownership of any bind-mounts used for the data and log dirs through the environment variable TAKE_FILE_OWNERSHIP
. When you do this, they will be owned by uid:gid 1000:0
, which provides the required read/write access to the Elasticsearch process.
Increased ulimits for nofile and nproc must be available for the Elasticsearch containers. Verify the init system for the Docker daemon sets them to acceptable values.
To check the Docker daemon defaults for ulimits, run:
docker run --rm centos:7 /bin/bash -c 'ulimit -Hn && ulimit -Sn && ulimit -Hu && ulimit -Su'
If needed, adjust them in the Daemon or override them per container. For example, when using docker run
, set:
--ulimit nofile=65535:65535
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 the Docker Daemon, or explicitly set for the container as shown in the sample compose file. When using docker run
, you can specify:
-e "bootstrap.memory_lock=true" --ulimit memlock=-1:-1
The image exposes TCP ports 9200 and 9300. For production clusters, randomizing the published ports with --publish-all
is recommended, unless you are pinning one container per host.
Use the ES_JAVA_OPTS
environment variable to set the heap size. For example, to use 16GB, specify -e ES_JAVA_OPTS="-Xms16g -Xmx16g"
with docker run
. Note that while the default configuration file jvm.options
sets a default heap of 1GB, any value you set in ES_JAVA_OPTS
will override it.
You must configure the heap size even if you are limiting memory access to the container.
While setting the heap size via an environment variable is the recommended method, you can also configure this by bind-mounting your own jvm.options
file under /usr/share/elasticsearch/config/
. The file that Elasticsearch provides contains some important settings, so you should start by taking a copy of jvm.options
from an Elasticsearch container and editing it as you require.
Pin your deployments to a specific version of the Elasticsearch Docker image. For example docker.elastic.co/elasticsearch/elasticsearch:7.6.2
.
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 advanced Docker volume plugins
If you are using the devicemapper storage driver, do not use the default loop-lvm
mode. Configure docker-engine to use direct-lvm.
Consider centralizing your logs by using a different logging driver. Also note that the default json-file logging driver is not ideally suited for production 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 files over the configuration files in the image.
You can set individual Elasticsearch configuration parameters using Docker environment variables. The sample compose file and the single-node example use this method.
To use the contents of a file to set an environment variable, suffix the environment variable name with _FILE
. This is useful for passing secrets such as passwords to Elasticsearch without specifying them directly.
For example, to set the Elasticsearch bootstrap password from a file, you can bind mount the file and set the ELASTIC_PASSWORD_FILE
environment variable to the mount location. If you mount the password file to /run/secrets/password.txt
, specify:
-e ELASTIC_PASSWORD_FILE=/run/secrets/bootstrapPassword.txt
You can also override the default command for the image to pass Elasticsearch configuration parameters as command line options. For example:
docker run <various parameters> bin/elasticsearch -Ecluster.name=mynewclustername
While bind-mounting your configuration files is usually the preferred method in production, you can also create a custom Docker image that 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:
-v full_path_to/custom_elasticsearch.yml:/usr/share/elasticsearch/config/elasticsearch.yml
The container runs Elasticsearch as user elasticsearch
using uid: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.
In some environments, it might make more sense to prepare a custom image that contains your configuration. A Dockerfile
to achieve this might be as simple as:
FROM docker.elastic.co/elasticsearch/elasticsearch:7.6.2
COPY --chown=elasticsearch:elasticsearch elasticsearch.yml /usr/share/elasticsearch/config/
You could then build and run the image with:
docker build --tag=elasticsearch-custom .
docker run -ti -v /usr/share/elasticsearch/data elasticsearch-custom
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 management for more information.
You now have a test Elasticsearch environment set up. Before you start serious development or go into production with Elasticsearch, you must do some additional setup:
- Learn how to configure Elasticsearch.
- Configure important Elasticsearch settings.
- Configure important system settings.