Configuration Fileedit

The default location of the configuration file is ~/.curator/curator.yml, but another location can be specified using the --config flag on the command-line.

You can use environment variables in your configuration files.

The configuration file contains client connection and settings for logging. It looks like this:

---
# Remember, leave a key empty if there is no value.  None will be a string,
# not a Python "NoneType"
elasticsearch:
  client:
    hosts:
      - http://127.0.0.1:9200
    cloud_id:
    ca_certs:
    client_cert:
    client_key:
    verify_certs:
    request_timeout: 30
  other_settings:
    master_only: False
    username:
    password:
    api_key:
      id:
      api_key:
      token:

logging:
  loglevel: INFO
  logfile:
  logformat: default
  blacklist: ['elastic_transport', 'urllib3']

It is a YAML configuration file. The two root keys must be elasticsearch and logging. The subkeys of each of these will be described here.

There are other keys available for the client subkey of the elasticsearch root key, many of which are listed here. The most commonly used ones (listed above) are described as follows:

hostsedit

All hosts must be in HTTP[S]://FQDN.DOMAIN.TLD:PORT form or they will be rejected and Curator will exit with an error. The only exception to this is HTTPS://FQDN.DOMAIN.TLD (without port), in which case :443 is implicit, and is, in fact, appended automatically.

If both cloud_id and hosts keys are populated an exception will be thrown and Curator will exit.

A hosts definition can be a single value:

hosts: http://127.0.0.1:9200

Or multiple values in the 3 acceptable YAML ways to render sequences, or arrays:

Curator can only work with one cluster at a time. Including clients from multiple clusters in the hosts setting will result in errors.

Flow:

hosts: [ "http://10.0.0.1:9200", "http://10.0.0.2:9200" ]

Spanning:

hosts: [ "http://10.0.0.1:9200",
    "http://10.0.0.2:9200" ]

Block:

hosts:
  - http://10.0.0.1:9200
  - http://10.0.0.2:9200

cloud_idedit

The value should encapsulated in quotes because of the included colon:

cloud_id: 'deployment_name:BIG_HASH_VALUE'

If both cloud_id and hosts keys are populated an exception will be thrown and Curator will exit.

ca_certsedit

This should be a file path to your CA certificate, or left empty.

ca_certs:

This setting allows the use of a specified CA certificate file to validate the SSL certificate used by Elasticsearch.

There is no default.

File paths

File paths can be specified as follows:

For Windows:

'C:\path\to\file'

For Linux, BSD, Mac OS:

'/path/to/file'

Using single-quotes around your file path is encouraged, especially with Windows file paths.

client_certedit

This should be a file path to a client certificate (public key), or left empty.

client_cert:

Allows the use of a specified SSL client cert file to authenticate to Elasticsearch. The file may contain both an SSL client certificate and an SSL key, in which case client_key is not used. If specifying client_cert, and the file specified does not also contain the key, use client_key to specify the file containing the SSL key. The file must be in PEM format, and the key part, if used, must be an unencrypted key in PEM format as well.

File paths

File paths can be specified as follows:

For Windows:

'C:\path\to\file'

For Linux, BSD, Mac OS:

'/path/to/file'

Using single-quotes around your file path is encouraged, especially with Windows file paths.

client_keyedit

This should be a file path to a client key (private key), or left empty.

client_key:

Allows the use of a specified SSL client key file to authenticate to Elasticsearch. If using client_cert and the file specified does not also contain the key, use client_key to specify the file containing the SSL key. The key file must be an unencrypted key in PEM format.

File paths

File paths can be specified as follows:

For Windows:

'C:\path\to\file'

For Linux, BSD, Mac OS:

'/path/to/file'

Using single-quotes around your file path is encouraged, especially with Windows file paths.

verify_certsedit

This should be True, False or left empty.

verify_certs:

If access to your Elasticsearch instance is protected by SSL encryption, you may set verify_certs to False to disable SSL certificate verification.

Valid use cases for doing so include the use of self-signed certificates that cannot be otherwise verified and would generate error messages.

Setting verify_certs to False will likely result in a warning message that your SSL certificates are not trusted. This is expected behavior.

The default value is True.

request_timeoutedit

This should be an integer number of seconds, or left empty.

request_timeout:

You can change the default client connection timeout value with this setting.

The default value is 30 (seconds) should typically not be changed to be very large. If a longer timeout is necessary for a given action, such as snapshot, restore, or forcemerge, the client timeout can be overridden on per action basis by setting timeout_override in the action options. There are default override values for some of those longer running actions.

master_onlyedit

This should be True, False or left empty.

master_only:

In some situations, primarily with automated deployments, it makes sense to install Curator on every node. But you wouldn’t want it to run on each node. By setting master_only to True, this is possible. It tests for, and will only continue running on the node that is the elected master.

If master_only is True, and hosts has more than one value, Curator will raise an Exception. This setting should only be used with a single host in hosts, as its utility centers around deploying to all nodes in the cluster.

The default value is False.

usernameedit

The HTTP Basic Authentication username

passwordedit

The HTTP Basic Authentication password

idedit

This should be the id portion of an API Key pair.

api_key:
  id:

This setting combined with the other subkey api_key allows API Key authentication to an Elasticsearch instance.

The default is empty.

api_keyedit

This should be the api_key portion of an API Key pair.

api_key:
  api_key:

This setting combined with the other subkey id allows API Key authentication to an Elasticsearch instance.

The default is empty.

tokenedit

This should be a base64 encoded representation of an API Key pair.

api_key:
  token:

This setting will override any values provided for the id or api_key subkeys of api_key.

The default is empty.

logleveledit

This should be CRITICAL, ERROR, WARNING, INFO, DEBUG, or left empty.

loglevel:

Set the minimum acceptable log severity to display.

  • CRITICAL will only display critical messages.
  • ERROR will only display error and critical messages.
  • WARNING will display error, warning, and critical messages.
  • INFO will display informational, error, warning, and critical messages.
  • DEBUG will display debug messages, in addition to all of the above.

The default value is INFO.

logfileedit

This should be a path to a log file, or left empty.

logfile:

File paths

File paths can be specified as follows:

For Windows:

'C:\path\to\file'

For Linux, BSD, Mac OS:

'/path/to/file'

Using single-quotes around your file path is encouraged, especially with Windows file paths.

The default value is empty, which will result in logging to STDOUT, or the console.

logformatedit

This should default, json, logstash, ecs or left empty.

logformat:

The default format looks like:

2016-04-22 11:53:09,972 INFO      Action #1: ACTIONNAME

The json or logstash formats look like:

{"@timestamp": "2016-04-22T11:54:29.033Z", "function": "cli", "linenum": 178,
"loglevel": "INFO", "message": "Action #1: ACTIONNAME", "name": "curator.cli"}

The ecs format looks like:

{"@timestamp":"2020-02-22T11:55:00.022Z","log.level":"info","message":"Action #1:
ACTIONNAME","ecs":{"version":"1.6.0"},"log":{"logger":"curator.cli","origin":
{"file":{"line":178,"name":"cli.py"},"function":"run"},"original":"Action #1:
ACTIONNAME"},"process":{"name":"MainProcess","pid":12345,"thread":
{"id":123456789886543,"name":"MainThread"}}}

The default value is default.

blacklistedit

This should be an empty array [], an array of log handler strings, or left empty.

blacklist: ['elastic_transport', 'urllib3']

The default value is ['elastic_transport', 'urllib3'], which will result in logs for the elastic_transport and urllib3 Python modules not being output. These can be quite verbose, so unless you need them to debug an issue, you should accept the default value.

If you do need to troubleshoot an issue, set blacklist to [], which is an empty array. Leaving it unset will result in the default behavior, which is to filter out elastic_transport and urllib3 log traffic.