Shutting down ElasticSearch

Even though we expect our cluster (or node) to run flawlessly for a lifetime, we may end up needing to restart it or shut it down properly (for example, for maintenance). There are three ways in which we can shut down ElasticSearch:

• If your node is attached to the console (run with the –f option), just press Ctrl + C

• The second option is to kill the server process by sending the TERM signal (see the kill command on the Linux boxes and program manager on Windows)

• The third method is to use a REST API

We will focus on the last method now. It allows us to shut down the whole cluster by executing the following command:

curl -XPOST http://localhost:9200/_cluster/nodes/_shutdown

To shut down just a single node, execute the following command:

curl –XPOST http://localhost:9200/_cluster/nodes/BlrmMvBdSKiCeYGsiHijdg/_shutdown

In the previous command line, BlrmMvBdSKiCeYGsiHijdg is the identifier for a given node. The former may be read from ElasticSearch logs or from another API call:

curl -XGET http://localhost:9200/_cluster/nodes/