Downloading and installing

Now that we have enough motivation and reasons to learn about Elasticsearch and Elastic Stack, let us start by downloading and installing the key components. Firstly, we will download and install Elasticsearch and Kibana. We will install the other components as we need them on the course of our journey. We also need Kibana because, apart from visualizations, it also has a UI for developer tools and for interacting with Elasticsearch.

Starting from Elastic Stack 5.x, all Elastic Stack components are now released together; they share the same version, and are tested for compatibility with each other. This is true for Elastic Stack 6.x components as well. 

At the time of this writing, the current released version of Elastic Stack is 6.0.0. We will use this version for all components.

Installing Elasticsearch

Elasticsearch can be downloaded as a ZIP, TAR, DEB, or RPM package. If you are on Ubuntu, Red Hat, or CentOS Linux, it can be directly installed using apt or yum.

We will use the ZIP format as it is the least intrusive and the easiest for development purposes.

1. Go to https://www.elastic.co/downloads/elasticsearch and download the ZIP distribution. You can also download an older version if you are looking for an exact version. 
2. Extract the file and change your directory to the top level extracted folder. Run bin/elasticsearch or bin/elasticsearch.bat.
3. Run curl http://localhost:9200 or open the URL in your favorite browser.

You should see an output like this:

Congratulations! You have just set up a single node Elasticsearch cluster.

Installing Kibana

Kibana is also available in a variety of packaging formats such as ZIP, TAR.GZ, RMP, and DEB for 32-bit and 64-bit architecture machines: 

1. Go to https://www.elastic.co/downloads/kibana and download the ZIP or TAR.GZ distribution for the platform that you are on. 
2. Extract the file and change your directory to the top level extracted folder. Run bin/kibana or bin/kibana.bat.
3. Open the URL http://localhost:5601 in your favorite browser.

Congratulations! You have a working setup of Elasticsearch and Kibana.