The following commands help you very quickly spin up a single-node Elasticsearch cluster, together with Kibana in Docker. Note that if you don’t need the Kibana UI, you can skip those instructions.

When would I use this setup?edit

Use this setup if you want to quickly spin up Elasticsearch (and Kibana) for local development or testing.

For example you might:

Prerequisitesedit

If you don’t have Docker installed, download and install Docker Desktop for your operating system.

Set environment variablesedit

Configure the following environment variables.

export ELASTIC_PASSWORD="<ES_PASSWORD>"  # password for "elastic" username
export KIBANA_PASSWORD="<KIB_PASSWORD>"   # Used _internally_ by Kibana, must be at least 6 characters long

Create a Docker networkedit

To run both Elasticsearch and Kibana, you’ll need to create a Docker network:

docker network create elastic-net

Run Elasticsearchedit

Start the Elasticsearch container with the following command:

docker run -p 127.0.0.1:9200:9200 -d --name elasticsearch --network elastic-net \
  -e ELASTIC_PASSWORD=$ELASTIC_PASSWORD \
  -e "discovery.type=single-node" \
  -e "xpack.security.http.ssl.enabled=false" \
  -e "xpack.license.self_generated.type=trial" \
  docker.elastic.co/elasticsearch/elasticsearch:8.15.0

Run Kibana (optional)edit

To run Kibana, you must first set the kibana_system password in the Elasticsearch container.

# configure the Kibana password in the ES container
curl -u elastic:$ELASTIC_PASSWORD \
  -X POST \
  http://localhost:9200/_security/user/kibana_system/_password \
  -d '{"password":"'"$KIBANA_PASSWORD"'"}' \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json'

Start the Kibana container with the following command:

docker run -p 127.0.0.1:5601:5601 -d --name kibana --network elastic-net \
  -e ELASTICSEARCH_URL=http://elasticsearch:9200 \
  -e ELASTICSEARCH_HOSTS=http://elasticsearch:9200 \
  -e ELASTICSEARCH_USERNAME=kibana_system \
  -e ELASTICSEARCH_PASSWORD=$KIBANA_PASSWORD \
  -e "xpack.security.enabled=false" \
  -e "xpack.license.self_generated.type=trial" \
  docker.elastic.co/kibana/kibana:8.15.0

Connecting to Elasticsearch with language clientsedit

To connect to the Elasticsearch cluster from a language client, you can use basic authentication with the elastic username and the password you set in the environment variable.

You’ll use the following connection details:

For example, to connect with the Python elasticsearch client:

import os
from elasticsearch import Elasticsearch

username = 'elastic'
password = os.getenv('ELASTIC_PASSWORD') # Value you set in the environment variable

client = Elasticsearch(
    "http://localhost:9200",
    basic_auth=(username, password)
)

print(client.info())

Here’s an example curl command using basic authentication:

curl -u elastic:$ELASTIC_PASSWORD \
  -X PUT \
  http://localhost:9200/my-new-index \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json'

Next stepsedit

Use our quick start guide to learn the basics of Elasticsearch: how to add data and query it.

Moving to productionedit

This setup is not suitable for production use. For production deployments, we recommend using our managed service on Elastic Cloud. Sign up for a free trial (no credit card required).

Otherwise, refer to Install Elasticsearch to learn about the various options for installing Elasticsearch in a self-managed production environment, including using Docker.