The easiest way to understand what Elasticsearch can do for you is to play with it, so let’s get started!
The only requirement for installing Elasticsearch is a recent version of Java. Preferably, you should install the latest version of the official Java from www.java.com.
You can download the latest version of Elasticsearch from elasticsearch.org/download.
curl -L -O http://download.elasticsearch.org/PATH/TO/LATEST/$VERSION.zip
unzip elasticsearch-$VERSION.zip
cd elasticsearch-$VERSION
Tip
|
When installing Elasticsearch in production, you can use the method described above, or the Debian or RPM packages provided on the downloads page. You can also use the officially supported Puppet module or Chef cookbook. |
Marvel is a management and monitoring tool for Elasticsearch which is free for development use. It comes with an interactive console called Sense which makes it very easy to talk to Elasticsearch directly from your browser.
Many of the code examples in this book include a ``View in Sense'' link. When clicked, it will open up a working example of the code in the Sense console. You do not have to install Marvel, but it will make this book much more interactive by allowing you to experiment with the code samples on your local Elasticsearch cluster.
Marvel is available as a plugin. To download and install it, run this command in the Elasticsearch directory:
./bin/plugin -i elasticsearch/marvel/latest
You probably don’t want Marvel to monitor your local cluster, so you can disable data collection with this command:
echo 'marvel.agent.enabled: false' >> ./config/elasticsearch.yml
Elasticsearch is now ready to run. You can start it up in the foreground with:
./bin/elasticsearch
Add -d
if you want to run it in the background as a daemon.
Test it out by opening another terminal window and running:
curl 'http://localhost:9200/?pretty'
You should see a response like this:
{
"status": 200,
"name": "Shrunken Bones",
"version": {
"number": "1.1.0",
"lucene_version": "4.7"
},
"tagline": "You Know, for Search"
}
This means that your Elasticsearch cluster is up and running, and we can start experimenting with it.
A node is a running instance of Elasticsearch. A cluster is a group of
nodes with the same cluster.name
that are working together to share data
and to provide failover and scale, although a single node can form a cluster
all by itself.