Having a Elasticsearch cluster on your laptop with Docker for testing is great. And in this post I will show you how quick and easy it is, to have a 3 node elasticsearch cluster running on docker for testing.

Pre-Requisites

We need to set the vm.max_map_count kernel parameter:

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$ sudo sysctl -w vm.max_map_count=262144

To set this permanently, add it to /etc/sysctl.conf and reload with sudo sysctl -p

Docker Compose:

The docker compose file that we will reference:

The data of our elasticsearch container volumes will reside under /var/lib/docker, if you want them to persist in another location, you can use the driver_opts setting for the local volume driver.

Deploy

Deploy your elasticsearch cluster with docker compose:

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$ docker-compose up

This will run in the foreground, and you should see console output.

Testing Elasticsearch

Let’s run a couple of queries, first up, check the cluster health api:

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$ curl http://127.0.0.1:9200/_cluster/health?pretty
{
  "cluster_name" : "docker-cluster",
  "status" : "green",
  "timed_out" : false,
  "number_of_nodes" : 3,
  "number_of_data_nodes" : 3,
  "active_primary_shards" : 1,
  "active_shards" : 2,
  "relocating_shards" : 0,
  "initializing_shards" : 0,
  "unassigned_shards" : 0,
  "delayed_unassigned_shards" : 0,
  "number_of_pending_tasks" : 0,
  "number_of_in_flight_fetch" : 0,
  "task_max_waiting_in_queue_millis" : 0,
  "active_shards_percent_as_number" : 100.0
}

Create a index with replication count of 2:

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$ curl -H "Content-Type: application/json" -XPUT http://127.0.0.1:9200/test -d '{"number_of_replicas": 2}'

Ingest a document to elasticsearch:

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$ curl -H "Content-Type: application/json" -XPUT http://127.0.0.1:9200/test/docs/1 -d '{"name": "ruan"}'
{"_index":"test","_type":"docs","_id":"1","_version":1,"result":"created","_shards":{"total":3,"successful":3,"failed":0},"_seq_no":0,"_primary_term":1}

View the indices:

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$ curl http://127.0.0.1:9200/_cat/indices?v
health status index                       uuid                   pri rep docs.count docs.deleted store.size pri.store.size
green  open   test                        w4p2Q3fTR4uMSYBfpNVPqw   5   2          1            0      3.3kb          1.1kb
green  open   .monitoring-es-6-2018.04.29 W69lql-rSbORVfHZrj4vug   1   1       1601           38        4mb            2mb

Kibana

Kibana is also included in the stack and is accessible via http://localhost:5601/ and you it should look more or less like:

Elasticsearch Head UI

I always prefer working directly with the RESTFul API, but if you would like to use a UI to interact with Elasticsearch, you can access it via http://localhost:9100/ and should look like this:

Deleting the Cluster:

As its running in the foreground, you can just hit ctrl + c and as we persisted data in our compose, when you spin up the cluster again, the data will still be there.

Resources:

• https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/current/docker.html

Update (2019.06) - I am preparing a full elasticsearch course available on https://github.com/ruanbekker/elasticsearch-demo and a Elasticsearch Cheetsheat, feel free to check it out.