HTTP/REST clients and security

The Elasticsearch security features work with standard HTTP basic authentication headers to authenticate users. Since Elasticsearch is stateless, this header must be sent with every request:

Authorization: Basic <TOKEN> 

This example uses curl without basic auth to create an index:

curl -XPUT 'localhost:9200/idx'

{
  "error":  "AuthenticationException[Missing authentication token]",
  "status": 401
}

Since no user is associated with the request above, an authentication error is returned. Now we’ll use curl with basic auth to create an index as the rdeniro user:

curl --user rdeniro:taxidriver -XPUT 'localhost:9200/idx'

{
  "acknowledged": true
}

For more information about using security features with the language specific clients, refer to Ruby, Python, Perl, PHP, .NET, Javascript