Set up Elasticsearch

This section includes information on how to setup Elasticsearch and get it running, including:

The matrix of officially supported operating systems and JVMs is available here: Support Matrix. Elasticsearch is tested on the listed platforms, but it is possible that it will work on other platforms too.

Elasticsearch is built using Java, and includes a bundled version of OpenJDK from the JDK maintainers (GPLv2+CE) within each distribution. The bundled JVM is the recommended JVM and is located within the jdk directory of the Elasticsearch home directory.

To use your own version of Java, set the ES_JAVA_HOME environment variable. If you must use a version of Java that is different from the bundled JVM, we recommend using a supported LTS version of Java. Elasticsearch will refuse to start if a known-bad version of Java is used. The bundled JVM directory may be removed when using your own JVM.

In production, we recommend you run Elasticsearch on a dedicated host or as a primary service. Several Elasticsearch features, such as automatic JVM heap sizing, assume it’s the only resource-intensive application on the host or container. For example, you might run Metricbeat alongside Elasticsearch for cluster statistics, but a resource-heavy Logstash deployment should be on its own host.