1. Getting Started

Elasticsearch First Steps

Welcome to the Elasticsearch First Steps Online Live Training. This wiki will help you set up and play with the course.

My upcoming Elasticsearch in Action book

I am authoring the second edition of Elasticsearch in Action (second edition) Book and is out for early access. It is a hands-on book that will delve in-depth to guide you in learning Elasticsearch from the ground up.

Installation

Follow the steps below to install and get your Elasticsearch and Kibana up and running.

Download Software

Visit elastic.co/downloads for a set of downloads

Software	Version	Link
Elasticsearch	8.11.1	https://www.elastic.co/downloads/elasticsearch
Kibana	8.11.1	https://www.elastic.co/downloads/kibana

Click on the Downloads for the appropriate binary for your Operating System. We use Binary/Archive for this class

Install Elasticsearch on Windows OS

This step is for Windows OS, please look at the Elastic link for the instructions for other OSs.

• Unpack the binary to your favourite folder
• cd <ELASTICSEARCH_INSTALL_DIR>/bin
• Execute the batch file: elasticsearch.bat You will see a message like 'Server started' in the command prompt console.

Install Elasticsearch on Mac OS

• Unpack the tar.gz binary to your working folder
• cd <ELASTICSEARCH_INSTALL_DIR>/bin
• Execute the following command: ./elasticsearch

There's a security related information gets printed (first ever time only) on the console, something like the following:

As you can see, should you wish to connect/check your server, there are credentials created automatically for us. Let's check how to use them in a moment.

Using Docker

Make sure you install Docker Desktop for Windows or for [Mac] (https://hub.docker.com/editions/community/docker-ce-desktop-mac/) on your machine.

Once Docker is installed, follow the commands: To install the Elasticsearch server: docker pull docker.elastic.co/elasticsearch/elasticsearch:7.12.1

You should see something like this:

mkonda@Mac-mini PLATFORM % docker pull docker.elastic.co/elasticsearch/elasticsearch:7.12.1
7.9.2: Pulling from elasticsearch/elasticsearch
f1feca467797: Pull complete 
2b669da077a4: Pull complete 
e5b4c466fc6d: Pull complete 
...
Digest: sha256:2be3302537236874fdeca184c78a49aed17d5aca0f8fc3f6192a80e93e817cb4
Status: Downloaded newer image for docker.elastic.co/elasticsearch/elasticsearch:7.12.1
docker.elastic.co/elasticsearch/elasticsearch:7.12.1

Now that you have the image installed, let's run a signgle-node server:

docker run -p 9200:9200 -p 9300:9300 -e "discovery.type=single-node" docker.elastic.co/elasticsearch/elasticsearch:7.13.0

Sanity Test

Once the server was up and running, let's check out the status by visiting http://localhost:9200 on your internet browser. This should provide a JSON response on the browser like the following:

{
"name": "Mac-mini.local",
"cluster_name": "elasticsearch",
"cluster_uuid": "pI_0RtKTTKigHGgf_IyEUw",
"version": {
"number": "7.12.1",
"build_flavor": "default",
"build_type": "tar",
"build_hash": "d34da0ea4a966c4e49417f2da2f244e3e97b4e6e",
"build_date": "2020-09-23T00:45:33.626720Z",
"build_snapshot": false,
"lucene_version": "8.6.2",
"minimum_wire_compatibility_version": "6.8.0",
"minimum_index_compatibility_version": "6.0.0-beta1"
},
"tagline": "You Know, for Search"
}

Now, let's test the Kibana tool too, as mentioned in the next section.

Install Kibana on MacOS

• Unpack the Kibana binary (tag.gz) to your favourite folder
• cd <KIBANA_INSTALL_DIR>/bin
• Execute the shell script: ./kibana

Install Kibana on Windows OS

• Unpack the Kibana binary to your favourite folder
• cd <KIBANA_INSTALL_DIR>/bin
• Execute the batch file: kibana.bat

You will see a message like below in the command prompt console.

  log   [12:41:36.302] [info][listening] Server running at http://localhost:5601
  log   [12:41:36.453] [info][server][Kibana][http] http server running at http://localhost:5601

Or on the MacOS terminal:

Sanity Test

Once the Kibana web app was up and running, visit http://localhost:5601. This should take you to a Web UI, home of Kibana. If you see a beautiful UI on your browser, your Kibana tool is all set and ready to go!

Kibana Home on MacOS:

Checking the state of the cluster

Let's issue a simple command to check the state of the cluster. Go to Kibaba, on your DevTools tab (left hand menu), enter the following API call:

GET _cluster/health

This should respond with

{
  "cluster_name" : "elasticsearch",
  "status" : "yellow",
  "timed_out" : false,
  "number_of_nodes" : 1,
  "number_of_data_nodes" : 1,
  "active_primary_shards" : 16,
  "active_shards" : 16,
  "relocating_shards" : 0,
  "initializing_shards" : 0,
  "unassigned_shards" : 10,
  "delayed_unassigned_shards" : 0,
  "number_of_pending_tasks" : 0,
  "number_of_in_flight_fetch" : 0,
  "task_max_waiting_in_queue_millis" : 0,
  "active_shards_percent_as_number" : 61.53846153846154
}

The status yellow indicates you have no replicas for your shards available. That is, should your Elasticsearch vanishes off, you'll be losing all the data. Let's see if we can start a new node but on the same machine and using the same binary (you wouldn't do the same on PROD environment though!)

Starting a Second Node Using the Same Binary

If you wish to start a new node on the same host using the same binary, we need to provide a couple of additional arguments to the script - the data and logs path directories. See Configuration section.

Shards Info

Let's get information about our shards. We use a cat API for this - short for Compact and Aligned Text.

The cat API is for our convenience, not for programmatic consumption.

GET _cat/shards?v which will result in:

Exercise 1

Index a document with four fields - title, rating, synopsis and release_date for a movie Godfather (search IMDB for info). Fetch the document (remember, the UUID in the response?) using GET method

Exercise 2

Index a document with four fields - title, rating, synopsis and release_date for a movie Godfather (search IMDB for info) with a document ID as 99. Retrieve the same document using GET