In this section, we will install Elasticsearch on a local machine as a single-node cluster. Once we have the cluster up and running, we will learn how to use cluster APIs to check the health of the nodes. We have a Windows section for Windows users, a Mac OS X section for Mac users, and a Debian/RPM section for users who want to install using the Debian (deb)/RPM package.

Elasticsearch is a Java-based application. Before we can run Elasticsearch, we need to make sure that we have Java installed. You need a Java Runtime Environment(JRE). Elasticsearch...

In this section, we will install Kibana. Kibana is a web interface to visualize and analyze the data in Elasticsearch. Kibana also provides developer tools, which is very handy for running Elasticsearch queries. The queries used in the book can be executed using Kibana developer tools. You need Elasticsearch up and running before you can start using Kibana. Make sure the Kibana version matches the Elasticsearch version. At the time of writing, the latest Elasticsearch version is 5.1.2.

You can download Kibana for Mac OS X from the following Elasticsearch website:

curl -L -O https://artifacts.elastic.co/downloads/kibana/kibana-5.1.2-darwin-x86_64.tar.gz
tar -xvf kibana-5.1.2-darwin-x86_64.tar.gz

Once...

The query format used in this book is based on Kibana Console. When using other HTTP clients such as cURL or Postman, the Elasticsearch endpoint (like http://127.0.0.1:900) should be passed in the URL, when using Kibana Console it is automatically inferred from Kibana settings. Using Kibana Console while in development or for debugging is strongly recommended. You can access Kibana Console by going to Dev Tools tab in the navigation bar on the left.

The Kibana Console look like the following:

Kibana Console has a very simple UI and is divided into request and response windows. The request window makes it very easy to work with JSON requests and supports auto-completion and auto indentation. The response window makes it very easy to follow the JSON response as you can expand or minimize parts of the JSON response. You can also copy...

The primary way of interacting with Elasticsearch is using the REST API over HTTP. If Kibana or Sense is not an option for you, you can use any of the popular HTTP clients, such as cURL or Postman. Curl is a command line-based client available on most operating systems. Postman is an UI-based HTTP client available for major operating systems. You can get postman from the following link:

https://www.getpostman.com/

To execute the queries in this book using other HTTP clients, you have to specify the Elasticsearch server address (such as http://127.0.0.1:9200) in front of the API endpoint to execute the query. Let's take an example query found in this book:

 POST es-index/_search
 {
   "query": {
     "match_all": {}
   }
 }

Elasticsearch provides various APIs for operational management of clusters and nodes. One of the important APIs is cluster API. In the previous section, we started a single-node cluster. We can check the health of the cluster using the cluster API as follows:

http://127.0.0.1:9200/_cluster/health?pretty

The pretty flag at the end of the URL makes the JSON response more readable. The response from the cluster API is shown next:

{
   "cluster_name": "es-dev",
   "status": "green",
   "timed_out": false,
   "number_of_nodes": 1,
   "number_of_data_nodes": 1,
   "active_primary_shards": 0,
   "active_shards": 0,
   "relocating_shards": 0,
   "initializing_shards": 0,
   "unassigned_shards": 0,
   "delayed_unassigned_shards": 0,
   "number_of_pending_tasks...

In this chapter, we learned how to install and configure Elasticsearch. We also learned how to install Kibana. We discussed the various HTTP clients we can use to talk to Elasticsearch. A lot of examples have been used throughout the book to better explain various concepts. With Elasticsearch and Kibana up and running, you can now try out the queries in the examples.

In the next chapter, we will talk about how to model data and manage relations in Elasticsearch.