Are you new to the Elastic stack or configuring a new machine and need an easy way to setup, and a single command to run Elasticsearch & Kibana? Here’s a quick Elasticsearch-Kibana setup using Docker for your dev environment.

Setup

Install Docker for your OS.
Pull the Docker image for Elasticsearch: docker pull docker.elastic.co/elasticsearch/elasticsearch:7.3.0 (you can change 7.3.0 to the latest or your preferred version).
Pull the Docker image for Kibana: docker pull docker.elastic.co/kibana/kibana:7.3.0.

Run

docker container stop es_dev && docker container rm es_dev
docker run \
    --name es_dev \
    -p 9200:9200 \
    -p 9300:9300 \
    -e "discovery.type=single-node" \
    docker.elastic.co/elasticsearch/elasticsearch:7.3.0 &\

docker run \
    --link es_dev:elasticsearch \
    -p 5601:5601 \
    docker.elastic.co/kibana/kibana:7.3.0 &

The first command stops the container named es_dev (arbitrary) if one exists and removes it. The second command starts a single-node Elasticsearch cluster inside a docker container named es_dev, and exposes it on ports 9200 and 9300. The third and last command starts Kibana on port 5601 and links it to the container (es_dev) where the Elasticsearch cluster is running. The last two commands are run concurrently.

You can add these three commands to a shell file (e.g elastic.sh) in order to run a single command to start Elasticsearch and Kibana i.e chmod +x elastic.sh && ./elastic.sh the first time and ./elastic.sh subsequently.

Test

Elasticsearch: curl http://127.0.0.1:9200/_cat/health (you should have a status of green if everything went well).
Kibana: visit http://localhost:5601 (the Kibana dashboard should load up).

Configure

Elasticsearch and Kibana can be configured using YAML. You can create config files and point to them when starting the containers.

Elasticsearch: add -v path/to/elasticsearch.yml:/usr/share/elasticsearch/config/elasticsearch.yml to docker run command.
Kibana: add -v path/to/kibana.yml:/usr/share/kibana/config/kibana.yml to docker run command.

Last modified on 2023-03-14