In order to connect to a cluster in Elasticsearch Service with the transport protocol, a plugin is required for the client. The plugin extends the transport protocol with three crucial features:

The two first are an obvious necessity when sending your traffic over the internet and the last one is to let our proxies know which cluster your client is trying to connect to.

The transport module is backwards-compatible with the default transport module. This means that it can safely be added as a transport.type, and it will only enable its authentication and SSL support when connecting to a cluster in Elasticsearch Service. This equals less differences in settings between local development, staging, and production.

The plugin is open source and published on GitHub.

Versions

In order to determine the version you should be using, please consult this version overview.

Installing

Releases of the plugin are built and published to the Maven central repository. To install, add a dependency to this module in your build system :

    <dependency>
        <groupId>no.found.elasticsearch</groupId>
        <artifactId>elasticsearch-transport-module</artifactId>
        <version>{version-from-the-above-overview}</version>
    </dependency>

The module is enabled by adding this project as a dependency to your application and setting the transport.type setting in Elasticsearch to no.found.elasticsearch.transport.netty.FoundNettyTransportModule.

Note: This is not a standard Elasticsearch plugin, it just needs to be on the application classpath. This also means that if you’re trying to make a pre-built third-party application connect to your Elasticsearch cluster, you can download the jar from Maven central and add it to the class path of the application.