News

Elasticsearch 2.0.0-beta2 released

Today, we are happy to announce the release of Elasticsearch 2.0.0-beta2, based on Lucene 5.2.1. This is the last planned beta release before the 2.0.0 release candidate.

IMPORTANT: This is a beta release and is intended for testing purposes only. Elasticsearch 2.0.0-beta2 is not compatible with 2.0.0-beta1, and there is no guarantee that Elasticsearch 2.0.0-beta2 will be compatible with Elasticsearch 2.0.0 GA. 

DO NOT DEPLOY IN PRODUCTION

You can download Elasticsearch 2.0.0-beta2 and read the full changes list here.

Thank you to those of you who tested out 2.0.0-beta1 and reported problems. The changes in Elasticsearch core since 2.0.0-beta1 consist mostly of bug fixes and tidy ups.

Our commercial plugins, however, deliver some important new features in this release, which you can read about in Shield and Watcher 2.0.0-beta2 released.  The highlights are as follows:

New features in Shield

Document- and field-level security
Shield now offers the ability to define roles which restrict access to the documents in an index using a query, and even to limit access to particular fields within a document. Unlike filtered aliases, these restrictions apply both when searching for documents and when retrieving documents by ID. See Field- and Document-level Security for more.

User impersonation
It is now possible to grant certain users the ability to impersonate other users and to execute requests on their behalf. This is particularly useful when authentication is performed by an application, which then needs to make requests to Elasticsearch which respect the permissions level of the user. See Submitting Requests for Other Users for more.

Pluggable authentication realms
In this release we’ve opened up the authentication realms infrastructure for third party extensions. If you have special authentication requirements that Shield doesn’t support out of the box — perhaps you’re required to use an internal identity management system — you can now write a plugin that introduces a new authentication realm to handle those requirements. See  Custom Realms for more.

New features in Watcher

Pausable watches
A new active/inactive state was added to watches which allows them to be paused and reactivated on demand. See  Active State  for more.

New actions for chatrooms
This release introduces the slack and hipchat actions which allow Watcher to send notifications either to a team chatroom or directly to a user in Slack or Hipchat. See Slack action and Hipchat action for more.

Elasticsearch Migration Plugin

The Elasticsearch Migration Plugin will help you to check whether you need to upgrade your indices, or take any other action, before trying out Elasticsearch 2.0.0-beta2. It will detect issues like ancient Lucene 3 indices and problematic mappings that will no longer work in the upcoming 2.0.0.

You can find the instructions for this plugin in the Elasticsearch Migration repository.

Happy testing!

The more beta testers we have, the sooner we can release Elasticsearch 2.0.0 GA, so please download Elasticsearch 2.0.0-beta2, try it out, and let us know what you think on Twitter (@elastic) or on our forum. You can report any problems on the GitHub issues page.