Elasticsearch can be quickly started for development or testing use with the following command:

docker run -p 9200:9200 -p 9300:9300 -e "discovery.type=single-node" docker.elastic.co/elasticsearch/elasticsearch:7.1.1

Note the use of single-node discovery that allows bypassing the bootstrap checks in a single-node development cluster.

The following example brings up a cluster comprising two Elasticsearch nodes. To bring up the cluster, use the docker-compose.yml and just type:

docker-compose up

The node es01 listens on localhost:9200 while es02 talks to es01 over a Docker network.

This example also uses Docker named volumes, called esdata01 and esdata02 which will be created if not already present.

docker-compose.yml:

version: '2.2'
services:
  es01:
    image: docker.elastic.co/elasticsearch/elasticsearch:7.1.1
    container_name: es01
    environment:
      - node.name=es01
      - discovery.seed_hosts=es02
      - cluster.initial_master_nodes=es01,es02
      - cluster.name=docker-cluster
      - bootstrap.memory_lock=true
      - "ES_JAVA_OPTS=-Xms512m -Xmx512m"
    ulimits:
      memlock:
        soft: -1
        hard: -1
    volumes:
      - esdata01:/usr/share/elasticsearch/data
    ports:
      - 9200:9200
    networks:
      - esnet
  es02:
    image: docker.elastic.co/elasticsearch/elasticsearch:7.1.1
    container_name: es02
    environment:
      - node.name=es02
      - discovery.seed_hosts=es01
      - cluster.initial_master_nodes=es01,es02
      - cluster.name=docker-cluster
      - bootstrap.memory_lock=true
      - "ES_JAVA_OPTS=-Xms512m -Xmx512m"
    ulimits:
      memlock:
        soft: -1
        hard: -1
    volumes:
      - esdata02:/usr/share/elasticsearch/data
    networks:
      - esnet

volumes:
  esdata01:
    driver: local
  esdata02:
    driver: local

networks:
  esnet:

To stop the cluster, type docker-compose down. Data volumes will persist, so it’s possible to start the cluster again with the same data using docker-compose up. To destroy the cluster and the data volumes, just type docker-compose down -v.

curl http://127.0.0.1:9200/_cat/health
1472225929 15:38:49 docker-cluster green 2 2 4 2 0 0 0 0 - 100.0%

Log messages go to the console and are handled by the configured Docker logging driver. By default you can access logs with docker logs.

For example, to define the cluster name with docker run you can pass -e "cluster.name=mynewclustername". Double quotes are required.

Create your custom config file and mount this over the image’s corresponding file. For example, bind-mounting a custom_elasticsearch.yml with docker run can be accomplished with the parameter:

-v full_path_to/custom_elasticsearch.yml:/usr/share/elasticsearch/config/elasticsearch.yml

In some environments, it may make more sense to prepare a custom image containing your configuration. A Dockerfile to achieve this may be as simple as:

FROM docker.elastic.co/elasticsearch/elasticsearch:7.1.1
COPY --chown=elasticsearch:elasticsearch elasticsearch.yml /usr/share/elasticsearch/config/

You could then build and try the image with something like:

docker build --tag=elasticsearch-custom .
docker run -ti -v /usr/share/elasticsearch/data elasticsearch-custom

Some plugins require additional security permissions. You have to explicitly accept them either by attaching a tty when you run the Docker image and accepting yes at the prompts, or inspecting the security permissions separately and if you are comfortable with them adding the --batch flag to the plugin install command. See Plugin Management documentation for more details.

Options can be passed as command-line options to the Elasticsearch process by overriding the default command for the image. For example:

docker run <various parameters> bin/elasticsearch -Ecluster.name=mynewclustername