Installation

This page guides you through the installation process of the client.

To install the latest version of the client, run the following command:

npm install @elastic/elasticsearch

To install a specific major version of the client, run the following command:

npm install @elastic/elasticsearch@<major>

To learn more about the supported major versions, please refer to the Compatibility matrix.

The client versioning follows the Elastic Stack versioning, this means that major, minor, and patch releases are done following a precise schedule that often does not coincide with the Node.js release times.

To avoid support insecure and unsupported versions of Node.js, the client will drop the support of EOL versions of Node.js between minor releases. Typically, as soon as a Node.js version goes into EOL, the client will continue to support that version for at least another minor release. If you are using the client with a version of Node.js that will be unsupported soon, you will see a warning in your logs (the client will start logging the warning with two minors in advance).

Unless you are always using a supported version of Node.js, we recommend defining the client dependency in your package.json with the ~ instead of ^. In this way, you will lock the dependency on the minor release and not the major. (for example, ~7.10.0 instead of ^7.10.0).

Language clients are forward compatible; meaning that clients support communicating with greater or equal minor versions of Elasticsearch without breaking. It does not mean that the client automatically supports new features of newer Elasticsearch versions; it is only possible after a release of a new client version. For example, a 8.12 client version won’t automatically support the new features of the 8.13 version of Elasticsearch, the 8.13 client version is required for that. Elasticsearch language clients are only backwards compatible with default distributions and without guarantees made.