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(I am new to elasticsearch)

I want to start elastic search as a service (sudo service elasticsearch start), but it wont start, and not tell anything about why it wont start either, just says -

Starting Elasticsearch Server [fail]

I tried following changes without success!

  1. Changed es.logger.level: INFO to es.logger.level: DEBUG and es.logger.level: TRACE respectively without seeing anything in the log files in var/log/elasticsearch!

  2. Added ES_HEAP_SIZE= 1024 and ES_HEAP_SIZE= 512 respectively in usr/share/elasticsearch/bin/elasticsearch text file, still -
    Starting Elasticsearch Server [fail]

I have not tried changing anything in the configuration file at etc/elasticsearch/elasticsearch.yml - is it required to change the settings of this file to make elasticsearch work as a service in ubuntu?

vjjj
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1 Answers1

7

It basically comes down to user permissions given to elasticsearch "user" - yes elasticsearch runs as a "user" inside Ubuntu! You need to give it ownership permissions inside folders it will eventually modify.

You need to do the following inside a terminal:

  1. sudo chown -R elasticsearch:elasticsearch /var/lib/elasticsearch

    /var/lib/elasticsearch is where elasticsearch stores data.

  2. sudo chown -R elasticsearch:elasticsearch /var/run/elasticsearch

    /var/run/elasticsearch is where the process id of elasticsearch running as a service is stored.

  3. sudo chown -R elasticsearch:elasticsearch /etc/elasticsearch

    /etc/elasticsearch is the place where configuration file for elasticsearch service and elasticsearch logs is stored.

Changing ownership of any of the above folders will bring you back to square one, you will need to follow steps 1, 2 and 3 again!

You may also need to set JAVA_HOME variable, to make elasticsearch run as a service.

(change elasticsearch.yml only as a root user, accessing it from within the terminal)

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vjjj
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  • I also needed to run: `sudo chown -R elasticsearch:elasticsearch /var/lib/elasticsearch` – Jonno_FTW Oct 07 '20 at 05:02
  • I'm not sure if any of these made any difference, but in my case: Even though the message said `[fail]`, the command `ps -ef | grep elasticsearch` showed that it's running, and the command `curl -X GET "localhost:9200/?pretty"` gave the right output proving that it's running. – ADTC Jun 10 '21 at 21:38