Plugin and packaging changes

Elasticsearch 2.0 runs with the Java security manager enabled and is much more restrictive about which paths it is allowed to access. Various paths can be configured, e.g. path.data, path.scripts, path.repo. A configured path may itself be a symbolic link, but no symlinks under that path will be followed.

The command line parameter parsing has been rewritten to deal properly with spaces in parameters. All config settings can still be specified on the command line when starting Elasticsearch, but they must appear after the built-in "static parameters", such as -d (to daemonize) and -p (the PID path).

For instance:

bin/elasticsearch -d -p /tmp/foo.pid --http.cors.enabled=true --http.cors.allow-origin='*'

For a list of static parameters, run bin/elasticsearch -h

The -f parameter, which used to indicate that Elasticsearch should be run in the foreground, was deprecated in 1.0 and removed in 2.0.

The -v parameter now means --verbose for both bin/plugin and bin/elasticsearch (although it has no effect on the latter). To output the version, use -V or --version instead.

The permissions of the config, bin, and plugins directories in the RPM and deb packages have been made more restrictive. The plugin manager should be run as root otherwise it will not be able to install plugins.

Almost all of the official Elasticsearch plugins have been moved to the main elasticsearch repository. They will be released at the same time as Elasticsearch and have the same version number as Elasticsearch.

Official plugins can be installed as follows:

sudo bin/plugin install analysis-icu

Community-provided plugins can be installed as before.

All plugins are now required to have a plugin-descriptor.properties file. If a node has a plugin installed which lacks this file, it will be unable to start.

Elasticsearch 2.0 changes the way the repository URLs are referenced. Instead of specific repositories for both major and minor versions, the repositories will use a major version reference only.

The URL for apt packages now uses the following structure;

deb https://packages.elastic.co/elasticsearch/2.x/debian stable main

And for yum packages it is;

baseurl=https://packages.elastic.co/elasticsearch/2.x/centos

The repositories page details this change.