Elasticsearch Chef Cookbook

Please review the frequently asked questions and contributing guidelines before opening issues or submitting pull requests.

Looking for Elasticsearch 5.x or 6.x?

Please check out the previous 3.x.x releases of this cookbook. Please consider pinning your cookbook to '> 3.0' for support for Elasticsearch 6 and earlier, or '> 4.0' release for Elasticsearch 6 and beyond.

Resources

Notifications and Service Start/Restart

The resources provided in this cookbook do not automatically restart services when changes have occurred. They do start services by default when configuring a new service This has been done to protect you from accidental data loss and service outages, as nodes might restart simultaneously or may not restart at all when bad configuration values are supplied.

elasticsearch_service has a special service_actions parameter you can use to specify what state the underlying service should be in on each chef run (defaults to :enabled and :started). It will also pass through all of the standard service resource actions to the underlying service resource if you wish to notify it.

You must supply your desired notifications when using each resource if you want Chef to automatically restart services. Again, we don't recommend this unless you know what you're doing.

Resource names

Many of the resources provided in this cookbook need to share configuration values. For example, the elasticsearch_service resource needs to know the path to the configuration file(s) generated by elasticsearch_configure and the path to the actual ES binary installed by elasticsearch_install. And they both need to know the appropriate system user and group defined by elasticsearch_user.

Search order: In order to make this easy, all resources in this cookbook use the following search order to locate resources that apply to the same overall Elasticsearch setup:

1. Resources that share the same resource name
2. Resources that share the same value for instance_name
3. Resources named default or resources named elasticsearch
   • This fails if both default and elasticsearch resources exist

Examples of more complicated resource names are left to the reader, but here we present a typical example that should work in most cases:

elasticsearch_user 'elasticsearch'
elasticsearch_install 'elasticsearch'
elasticsearch_configure 'elasticsearch'
elasticsearch_service 'elasticsearch'
elasticsearch_plugin 'x-pack'

elasticsearch_user

Actions: :create, :remove

Creates a user and group on the system for use by elasticsearch. Here is an example with many of the default options and default values (all options except a resource name may be omitted).

Examples:

elasticsearch_user 'elasticsearch'

elasticsearch_user 'elasticsearch' do
  username 'elasticsearch'
  groupname 'elasticsearch'
  shell '/bin/bash'
  comment 'Elasticsearch User'

  action :create
end

elasticsearch_install

Actions: :install, :remove

Downloads the elasticsearch software, and unpacks it on the system. There are currently three ways to install -- 'repository' (the default), which creates an apt or yum repo and installs from there, 'package', which downloads the appropriate package from elasticsearch.org and uses the package manager to install it, and 'tarball' which downloads a tarball from elasticsearch.org and unpacks it. This resource also comes with a :remove action which will remove the package or directory elasticsearch was unpacked into.

You may always specify a download_url and/or download_checksum, and you may include %s which will be replaced by the version parameter you supply.

Please be sure to consult the above attribute section as that controls how Elasticsearch version, download URL and checksum are determined if you omit them.

NOTE: The :remove action has not been implemented yet. Pull requests are very much welcome & encouraged, if you'd like to see this feature.

Examples:

elasticsearch_install 'elasticsearch'

elasticsearch_install 'my_es_installation' do
  type 'package'
  version '7.8.0'
  action :install
end

elasticsearch_install 'my_es_installation' do
  type 'tarball'
  dir '/usr/local' # where to install

  download_url "https://download.elasticsearch.org/elasticsearch/elasticsearch/elasticsearch-1.7.2.tar.gz"
  # sha256
  download_checksum "6f81935e270c403681e120ec4395c28b2ddc87e659ff7784608b86beb5223dd2"

  action :install
end

elasticsearch_install 'my_es_installation' do
  type 'tarball'
  version '7.8.0'
  action :install # could be :remove as well
end

elasticsearch_install 'my_es_installation' do
  type 'package' # type of install
  download_url "https://download.elasticsearch.org/elasticsearch/elasticsearch/elasticsearch-1.7.2.deb"
  # sha256
  download_checksum "791fb9f2131be2cf8c1f86ca35e0b912d7155a53f89c2df67467ca2105e77ec2"
  instance_name 'elasticsearch'
  action :install # could be :remove as well
end

elasticsearch_configure

Actions: :manage, :remove

Configures an elasticsearch instance; creates directories for configuration, logs, and data. Writes files log4j2.properties, elasticsearch.in.sh and elasticsearch.yml.

The main attribute for this resource is configuration, which is a hash of any elasticsearch configuration directives. The other important attribute is default_configuration -- this contains the minimal set of required defaults.

Note that these are both not a Chef mash, everything must be in a single level of keys and values. Any settings you pass in configuration will be merged into (and potentially overwrite) any default settings.

See the examples, as well as the attributes in the resource file, for more.

Examples:

With all defaults -

elasticsearch_configure 'elasticsearch'

With mostly defaults -

elasticsearch_configure 'elasticsearch' do
    allocated_memory '512m'
    configuration ({
      'cluster.name' => 'escluster',
      'node.name' => 'node01',
      'http.port' => 9201
    })
end

Very complicated -

elasticsearch_configure 'my_elasticsearch' do
  # if you override one of these, you probably want to override all
  path_home     "/opt/elasticsearch"
  path_conf     "/etc/opt/elasticsearch"
  path_data     "/var/opt/elasticsearch"
  path_logs     "/var/log/elasticsearch"
  path_pid      "/var/run/elasticsearch"
  path_plugins  "/opt/elasticsearch/plugins"
  path_bin      "/opt/elasticsearch/bin"

  # override logging parameters
  cookbook_log4j2_properties "my_wrapper_cookbook"
  template_log4j2_properties "my_log4j2.properties.erb"

  logging({:"action" => 'INFO'})

  allocated_memory '123m'

  jvm_options %w(
                -XX:+UseParNewGC
                -XX:+UseConcMarkSweepGC
                -XX:CMSInitiatingOccupancyFraction=75
                -XX:+UseCMSInitiatingOccupancyOnly
                -XX:+HeapDumpOnOutOfMemoryError
                -XX:+PrintGCDetails
              )

  configuration ({
    'node.name' => 'crazy'
  })

  action :manage
end

elasticsearch_service

Actions: :configure, :remove

Writes out a system service configuration of the appropriate type, and enables it to start on boot. You can override almost all of the relevant settings in such a way that you may run multiple instances. Most settings will be taken from a matching elasticsearch_config resource in the collection.

elasticsearch_service 'elasticsearch'

If you'd like to skip init scripts and systemd scripts, simply pass nil for the template file (init_source or systemd_source) and this cookbook will entirely skip trying to setup those scripts. Combined with changing the default service actions, this will have the same effect as action :nothing.

elasticsearch_plugin

Actions: :install, :remove

Installs or removes a plugin to a given elasticsearch instance and plugin directory. Please note that there is currently no way to upgrade an existing plugin using commandline tools, so we haven't exposed that feature here either. Furthermore, there isn't a way to determine if a plugin is compatible with ES or even what version it is. So once we install a plugin to a directory, we generally assume that is the desired one and we don't touch it further.

See #264 for more info. NB: You may encounter issues on certain distros with NSS 3.16.1 and OpenJDK 7.x.

Officially supported or commercial plugins require just the plugin name:

elasticsearch_plugin 'analysis-icu' do
  action :install
end
elasticsearch_plugin 'shield' do
  action :install
end

Plugins from GitHub require a URL of 'username/repository' or 'username/repository/version':

elasticsearch_plugin 'kopf' do
  url 'lmenezes/elasticsearch-kopf'
  action :install
end

elasticsearch_plugin 'kopf' do
  url 'lmenezes/elasticsearch-kopf/1.5.7'
  action :install
end

Plugins from Maven Central or Sonatype require 'groupId/artifactId/version':

elasticsearch_plugin 'mapper-attachments' do
  url 'org.elasticsearch/elasticsearch-mapper-attachments/2.6.0'
  action :install
end

Plugins can be installed from a custom URL or file location as follows:

elasticsearch_plugin 'mapper-attachments' do
  url 'http://some.domain.name//my-plugin-1.0.0.zip'
  action :install
end

elasticsearch_plugin 'mapper-attachments' do
  url 'file:/path/to/my-plugin-1.0.0.zip'
  action :install
end

The plugin resource respects the https_proxy or http_proxy (non-SSL) Chef settings unless explicitly disabled using chef_proxy false:

elasticsearch_plugin 'kopf' do
  url 'lmenezes/elasticsearch-kopf'
  chef_proxy false
  action :install
end

To run multiple instances per machine, an explicit plugin_dir location has to be provided:

elasticsearch_plugin 'x-pack' do
  plugin_dir '/usr/share/elasticsearch_foo/plugins'
end

If for some reason, you want to name the resource something else, you may provide the true plugin name using the plugin_name parameter:

elasticsearch_plugin 'xyzzy' do
  plugin_name 'kopf'
  url 'lmenezes/elasticsearch-kopf'
  action :install
end

License

This software is licensed under the Apache 2 license, quoted below.

    Copyright (c) 2015 Elasticsearch <https://www.elastic.co/>

    Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License");
    you may not use this file except in compliance with the License.
    You may obtain a copy of the License at

       http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0

    Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software
    distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS,
    WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied.
    See the License for the specific language governing permissions and
    limitations under the License.