Failures due to relocation of the configuration filesedit

Symptoms:

  • Active Directory or LDAP realms might stop working after upgrading to Elasticsearch 6.3 or later releases. In 6.4 or later releases, you might see messages in the Elasticsearch log that indicate a config file is in a deprecated location.

Resolution:

By default, in 6.2 and earlier releases, the security configuration files are located in the ES_PATH_CONF/x-pack directory, where ES_PATH_CONF is an environment variable that defines the location of the config directory.

In 6.3 and later releases, the config directory no longer contains an x-pack directory. The files that were stored in this folder, such as the log4j2.properties, role_mapping.yml, roles.yml, users, and users_roles files, now exist directly in the config directory.

If you upgraded to 6.3 or later releases, your old security configuration files still exist in an x-pack folder. That file path is deprecated, however, and you should move your files out of that folder.

In 6.3 and later releases, settings such as files.role_mapping default to ES_PATH_CONF/role_mapping.yml. If you do not want to use the default locations, you must update the settings appropriately. See Security settings.