Running a Local ElasticSearch Cluster for Development

ElasticSearch is a document database built on Lucene, a full text-search engine. It clusters and is useful in a variety of scenarios. If you want to run it locally and test some of the clustering feature, here are some things I learned from my experience.

Install with your preferred package manager, or from source. In my case I use homebrew, so install is as easy as:

brew install elasticsearch

You can run multiple nodes from one install. First, you will want to tweak the config. For me, the elasticsearch.yml config file was located in /usr/local/Cellar/elasticsearch/1.4.0/config/, but that may vary based on your OS, package manager, or version.

Mainly, I set a value for cluster. name:

cluster.name: some_cluster_name_of_your_choosing
marvel.agent.enabled: false

By default, elasticsearch joins any cluster with the same name, so you do not want to run on the default or you will be syncing with other local developers on your network.

Then you want to configure your startup mechanism. For some users, that would mean configuring the elasticsearch file in /etc/init.d, but for OS X homebrew users, my startup file is ~/Library/LaunchAgents/homebrew.mxcl.elasticsearch.plist. First, setup extra nodes. In OS X, that means making copies of the LaunchAgent file in the same directory with unique names. It’s worth noting if you’re using homebrew, that the original LaunchAgent plist file is a symlink and you’ll want to copy the contents to a new file. I numbered my extra nodes, so the filenames were homebrew.mxcl.elasticsearch2.plist, and so on. I altered the plist file to have a couple of extra arguments, specified in the ProgramArguments node. I removed the xml nodes that specify keeping the worker alive. The results were:

I set custom node names and ports via the plist file. Note that on a Linux based machine, you would later the service to run multiple ElasticSearch nodes with those custom parameters.

Finally, since I didn’t want to run those scripts individually each time, I create a script to launch all nodes at once. Note that you’ll want to add execute permissions and put it somewhere in your path.

Finally, I recommend installing Marvel, particulary for Sense, a nice tool for running commands on ElasticSearch. You can install Marvel with this command in the ElasticSearch root directory (for me, /usr/local/Cellar/elasticsearch/1.4.0/):

bin/plugin -i elasticsearch/marvel/latest

Now you can bring the cluster up with es_cluster

Enjoy!