Running Elasticsearch

Installation options

Elasticsearch is a server-side component. It runs as a service on one or more servers or containers.

The easiest way to run Elasticsearch is on Elastic Cloud, which uses the infrastructure of major cloud providers. As you create a deployment, Elastic Cloud offers you the choice to run on AWS, Google Cloud or Microsoft Azure. If you already have credits with a cloud provider, you can provision deployments through that cloud provider’s marketplace.

If you don’t want to run Elasticsearch on a public cloud provider, there are several options to run Elasticsearch on your own hardware. For Production workloads, Elastic Cloud on Kubernetes (ECK) is a good choice, especially if you are already using Kubernetes. Elastic also provides several non-Kubernetes alternatives. There are binaries that you can run as a service, RPM or Debian packages to install Elasticsearch as a Linux service, and Docker container images.

For running a local development environment, Elastic provides several options. You can use a start-local script that runs a one-node Elasticsearch cluster and Kibana locally, you can download binaries for most platforms, or run on Docker.

Start a development environment using Docker Compose

The easiest way to run a multi-node Elasticsearch cluster and Kibana is using Docker Compose.

Download, install, and start Docker Desktop.
Create a directory. In that directory, download these two files:
- docker-compose.yml
- .env
The docker-compose.yml file describes the containers that will be run. You don’t need to edit this file. The .env file contains variables that you will edit next.
Edit the .env file and set values for these three variables:
1. ELASTIC_PASSWORD - choose any password of at least 6 characters.
2. KIBANA_PASSWORD - choose any password of at least 6 characters.
3. STACK_VERSION - set to the desired version of Elasticsearch, for example: 8.17.2.
Open a terminal, change into the directory containing the files, and run:
```
docker-compose up -d
```