Downloading and installing Elasticsearch

Elasticsearch has an active community, and the release cycles are very fast; generally, new minor releases are available every 2 or 3 weeks.

Since Elasticsearch depends on many common Java libraries (Lucene, Guice, and Jackson are the most famous ones), the Elasticsearch community tries to keep them updated and fix bugs that are discovered in them and in the Elasticsearch core.

The large user base is also a source of new ideas and features for improving Elasticsearch use cases.

For these reasons, if possible, it's best to use the latest available release; this is usually the most stable, with plenty of rich features, and bug-free as well. At the time of writing this book, the version is 8.0.0.

Getting ready

To install Elasticsearch, you need a supported operating system (Linux/macOS X/Windows) and a web browser, which is required to download the Elasticsearch binary release. At least 1 GB of free disk space is required to...