Tech Topics

Curator 3.2.0 Released

Curator 3.2.0 is here!  While this release is an incremental improvement over 3.1.0 and 3.0.0, there are some noteworthy things we just had to let you know about:

What’s new?

Some of the changes included in 3.2.0 are:

  • Synced flush support (the seal command)
  • Experimental support for SSL certificate validation 
  • Alias creation
  • The --skip-repo-validation flag
  • Bug fixes
  • Usage improvements

Let’s take a look at some of these!

Synced Flush Support

With the release of Elasticsearch 1.6 came a highly anticipated feature: Synced Flushes, which allows your cluster to recover more quickly.  The best part of this feature is that your indices will automatically have the benefits of this feature applied as soon as they go inactive (5 minutes with no indexing).  However, there may be times when you need to shut down immediately, but want to have your indices recover more quickly via a synced flush.  If you run into such a scenario, Curator can help:

curator seal indices --all-indices


Of course, you can use all of the regular index selection parameters, too!

Curator will detect if your cluster is 1.6+ and will automatically perform a synced flush on indices before they are closed.

Alias Creation

In all prior versions of Curator, an alias had to already exist in order to add or remove indices to it.  Now, starting with 3.2.0, if the alias does not exist, Curator will create it with the indices you specify.

The --skip-repo-validation Flag

Beginning with Elasticsearch 1.4, creating a snapshot repository would result in Elasticsearch testing all nodes to ensure each had read/write access to the shared filesystem, be it NFS, S3, Azure, HDFS, etc.  An API call to manually test write access also came with it.  This API call is used by Curator as a test before snapshots as a safety check, ensuring that all nodes still have write access to the repository.  This has helped some users find errors that might have resulted in incomplete or broken snapshots.  However, some users reported intermittent errors with this validation check, usually as a result of the test timing out for some reason, rather than that the file system was unavailable.

Because it is a safety check to ensure availability, it is not recommended that you use the --skip-repo-validation flag unless you are completely certain that all nodes have functional read/write access to the repository and that the errors are the result of intermittent network timing issues.

Experimental: SSL Certificate Validation

This was a requested feature.  If you’re using SSL to connect to your Elasticsearch instance (you’re using Shield, for example), if you have signed certificates you may see warnings that your certificate is invalid, even though it is valid.  With the new validation feature, these false-positive warnings should go away.  In order to use this feature you need to be using Curator 3.2.0 and have the Python Certifi module installed.  This can be installed easily by running:

pip install certifi


With the certifi module installed, SSL certificate validation should be automatic.  This feature is experimental, so please report any issues you may encounter at https://github.com/elastic/curator/issues

One more thing…

All these features make for a great release.  But this isn’t all that we have cooked up for you.

Introducing…

Package Repositories

Curator is a Python-based product, which can complicate deployment on servers without pip installed.  The call for package-based deployment has been heard, and answered!

NOTE: If you have already installed Curator by way of pip, you should continue to use pip.  These packages provide Python modules which may otherwise conflict with modules installed via pip or easy_install.

  • If you are using a Debian or Ubuntu-based system, you can follow these instructions.
    • Tested with Ubuntu 12.04 and 14.04
  • If you are using RedHat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) or CentOS, follow these instructions.
    • Tested with CentOS 6 (6.0 - 6.6) and CentOS 7 (7.1)

We even have Windows binaries (64bit only)!  These binaries are compiled using the fantastic tool, Nuitka.  As a result, you no longer need to have Python installed on Windows to use Curator.  Unzip the package, and run the Curator exe file in a CMD or PowerShell window.

Conclusion

We hope you like the new features, and the availability of packages!  With the release of packages, and package repositories, Curator is now even easier to obtain and deploy—wherever you may need it. 

Happy Curating!