Elasticsearch

Managed instance of Elasticsearch. There’s a role for each supported major version, currently:

  • elasticsearch6: 6.8.21

  • elasticsearch7: 7.10.2

We also provide Kibana for both versions as a separate component.

We use the free versions of Elasticsearch, which are published under the Apache 2.0 license. Client libraries may not work or need additional configuration if they expect the unfree versions of Elasticsearch. Note that x-pack features are not available in the free version.

Elastic doesn’t provide updates to the 7.x line anymore so 7.10.2 will be the last available version. We are planning to move to OpenSearch instead which is a fork of Elasticsearch 7.10.2.

Interaction

The Elasticsearch API is listening on the SRV interface. You can access the API of nodes in the same project via HTTP without authentication. Some examples:

Show active nodes:

curl test66:9200/_cat/nodes

Show cluster health:

curl test66:9200/_cat/health

Show indices:

curl test66:9200/_cat/indices

Configuration

The role works without additional config for single-node setups. By default, the cluster name is the host name of the machine.

Custom config can be set via NixOS options which is required for multi-node setups. Plain config in /etc/local/elasticsearch is still supported, too. See /etc/local/elasticsearch/elasticsearch/elasticsearch.nix.example for an example. Copy the file to /etc/local/nixos/elasticsearch.nix, for example, to include it in the system config.

To see the final rendered config for Elasticsearch, use the elasticsearch-show-config command as service or sudo-srv user.

To activate config changes, run sudo fc-manage --build (see Local Configuration for details).

NixOS Options

flyingcircus.roles.elasticsearch.clusterName

The cluster name ES will use. By default, the string from /etc/local/elasticsearch/clusterName is used. If the file doesn’t exist, the host name is used as fallback. Because of this, you have to set the cluster name explicitly if you want to set up a multi-node cluster.

flyingcircus.roles.elasticsearch.heapPercentage

Percentage of memory to use for ES heap. Defaults to 50 % of available RAM: systemMemory * heapPercentage / 100

flyingcircus.roles.elasticsearch.esNodes

Names of the nodes that join this cluster and are eligible as masters. By default, all ES nodes in a resource group are part of this cluster and master-eligible. Note that all of them have to use the same clusterName which must be set explicitly when you want to set up a multi-node cluster.

If only one esNode is given here, the node will start in single-node mode which means that it won’t try to find other ES nodes before initializing the cluster.

Having both ES6 and ES7 nodes in a cluster is possible. This allows rolling upgrades. Note that new nodes that are added to a cluster have to use the newest version.

ES7: Values must use the same format as nodeName (just the hostname by default) or cluster initialization will fail.

flyingcircus.roles.elasticsearch.initialMasterNodes

(ES7 only, has no effect for ES6)

Name of the nodes that should take a part in the initial master election.

Warning

This should only be set when initializing a cluster with multiple nodes from scratch and removed after the cluster has formed!

By default, this is empty which means that the node will join an existing cluster or run in single-node mode when esNodes has only one entry. You can set this to config.flyingcircus.roles.elasticsearch.esNodes to include all automatically discovered nodes.

flyingcircus.roles.elasticsearch.extraConfig

Additional YAML lines which are appended to the main elasticsearch.yml config file.

Legacy Custom Config

You can add a file named /etc/local/elasticsearch/clusterName, with the cluster name as its sole contents.

To add additional configuration options, create a file /etc/local/elasticsearch/elasticsearch.yml. Its contents will be appended to the base configuration.

Upgrades

Rolling upgrades for Elasticsearch 6 multi-node clusters to 7 are supported. Nodes should be upgraded one at a time to ensure continous operation of the cluster. Upgrading nodes is done by changing the role of the machine to elasticsearch7.

Monitoring

The following checks are provided by the elasticsearch roles:

  • Circuit Breakers active

  • Cluster Health

  • File descriptors in use

  • Heap too full

  • Node status

  • Shard allocation status