Have you ever encountered a situation where your company has one system for logs, another for search, and yet another for monitoring—each requiring separate maintenance, separate learning curves, and separate permission management, splitting a team into three? I’ve been through this, and it lasted for several years.

Only after switching entirely to Elasticsearch did I realize that a single engine could handle logs, search, and monitoring—all three completely different workloads—at the same time. Elasticsearch is an open-source distributed search engine built on Apache Lucene.

It handles petabyte-scale data through horizontal scaling and supports full-text search, vector search, log analysis, and metrics monitoring. Indexing and querying are essentially real-time, and aggregation analysis is robust. It’s also frequently used as a vector database for RAG and generative AI. With Kibana for visualization and Logstash for data pipelines, the entire Elastic Stack covers all the scenarios mentioned above.

https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch…

elastic/elasticsearch

Source: https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch

= Elasticsearch

Elasticsearch is a distributed search and analytics engine, scalable data store and vector database optimized for speed and relevance on production-scale workloads. Elasticsearch is the foundation of Elastic’s open Stack platform. Search in near real-time over massive datasets, perform vector searches, integrate with generative AI applications, and much more.

Use cases enabled by Elasticsearch include:

• https://www.elastic.co/search-labs/blog/articles/retrieval-augmented-generation-rag[Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG)]
• https://www.elastic.co/search-labs/blog/categories/vector-search[Vector search]
• Full-text search
• Logs
• Metrics
• Application performance monitoring (APM)
• Security logs

... and more!

To learn more about Elasticsearch’s features and capabilities, see our https://www.elastic.co/products/elasticsearch[product page].

To access information on https://www.elastic.co/search-labs/blog/categories/ml-research[machine learning innovations] and the latest https://www.elastic.co/search-labs/blog/categories/lucene[Lucene contributions from Elastic], more information can be found in https://www.elastic.co/search-labs[Search Labs].

[[get-started]] == Get started

The simplest way to set up Elasticsearch is to create a managed deployment with https://www.elastic.co/cloud/as-a-service[Elasticsearch Service on Elastic Cloud].

If you prefer to install and manage Elasticsearch yourself, you can download the latest version from https://www.elastic.co/downloads/elasticsearch[elastic.co/downloads/elasticsearch].

=== Run Elasticsearch locally

//// IMPORTANT: This content is replicated in the Elasticsearch repo. See run-elasticsearch-locally.asciidoc. Ensure both files are in sync.

https://github.com/elastic/start-local is the source of truth. ////

[WARNING]

DO NOT USE THESE INSTRUCTIONS FOR PRODUCTION DEPLOYMENTS.

This setup is intended for local development and testing only.

Quickly set up Elasticsearch and Kibana in Docker for local development or testing, using the https://github.com/elastic/start-local?tab=readme-ov-file#-try-elasticsearch-and-kibana-locally[start-local script].

i️ For more detailed information about the start-local setup, refer to the https://github.com/elastic/start-local[README on GitHub].

==== Prerequisites

• If you don’t have Docker installed, https://www.docker.com/products/docker-desktop[download and install Docker Desktop] for your operating system.
• If you’re using Microsoft Windows, then install https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/install[Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL)].

==== Trial license This setup comes with a one-month trial license that includes all Elastic features.

After the trial period, the license reverts to Free and open - Basic. Refer to https://www.elastic.co/subscriptions[Elastic subscriptions] for more information.

==== Run start-local

To set up Elasticsearch and Kibana locally, run the start-local script:

[source,sh]

curl -fsSL https://elastic.co/start-local | sh

// NOTCONSOLE

This script creates an elastic-start-local folder containing configuration files and starts both Elasticsearch and Kibana using Docker.

After running the script, you can access Elastic services at the following endpoints:

• Elasticsearch: http://localhost:9200
• Kibana: http://localhost:5601

The script generates a random password for the elastic user, which is displayed at the end of the installation and stored in the .env file.

[CAUTION]

This setup is for local testing only. HTTPS is disabled, and Basic authentication is used for Elasticsearch. For security, Elasticsearch and Kibana are accessible only through localhost.

==== API access

An API key for Elasticsearch is generated and stored in the .env file as ES_LOCAL_API_KEY. Use this key to connect to Elasticsearch with a https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/client/index.html[programming language client] or the https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/current/rest-apis.html[REST API].

From the elastic-start-local folder, check the connection to Elasticsearch using curl:

[source,sh]

source .env curl $ES_LOCAL_URL -H “Authorization: ApiKey ${ES_LOCAL_API_KEY}”

To use the password for the elastic user, set and export the ES_LOCAL_PASSWORD environment variable. For example:

[source,sh]

source .env export ES_LOCAL_PASSWORD

// NOTCONSOLE

=== Send requests to Elasticsearch

You send data and other requests to Elasticsearch through REST APIs. You can interact with Elasticsearch using any client that sends HTTP requests, such as the https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/client/index.html[Elasticsearch language clients] and https://curl.se[curl].

==== Using curl

Here’s an example curl command to create a new Elasticsearch index, using basic auth:

[source,sh]

curl -u elastic:$ES_LOCAL_PASSWORD
-X PUT
http://localhost:9200/my-new-index
-H ‘Content-Type: application/json’

// NOTCONSOLE

==== Using a language client

To connect to your local dev Elasticsearch cluster with a language client, you can use basic authentication with the elastic username and the password stored in the ES_LOCAL_PASSWORD environment variable.

You’ll use the following connection details:

• Elasticsearch endpoint: http://localhost:9200
• Username: elastic
• Password: $ES_LOCAL_PASSWORD (Value you set in the environment variable)

For example, to connect with the Python elasticsearch client:

[source,python]

import os from elasticsearch import Elasticsearch

username = ‘elastic’ password = os.getenv(‘ES_LOCAL_PASSWORD’) # Value you set in the environment variable

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

print(client.info())

==== Using the Dev Tools Console

Kibana’s developer console provides an easy way to experiment and test requests. To access the console, open Kibana, then go to Management > Dev Tools.

Add data

You index data into Elasticsearch by sending JSON objects (documents) through the REST APIs. Whether you have structured or unstructured text, numerical data, or geospatial data, Elasticsearch efficiently stores and indexes it in a way that supports fast searches.

For timestamped data such as logs and metrics, you typically add documents to a data stream made up of multiple auto-generated backing indices.

To add a single document to an index, submit an HTTP post request that targets the index.

POST /customer/_doc/1 { “firstname”: “Jennifer”, “lastname”: “Walters” }

This request automatically creates the customer index if it doesn’t exist, adds a new document that has an ID of 1, and stores and indexes the firstname and lastname fields.

The new document is available immediately from any node in the cluster. You can retrieve it with a GET request that specifies its document ID:

GET /customer/_doc/1

To add multiple documents in one request, use the _bulk API. Bulk data must be newline-delimited JSON (NDJSON). Each line must end in a newline character (\n), including the last line.

PUT customer/_bulk { “create”: { } } { “firstname”: “Monica”,“lastname”:“Rambeau”} { “create”: { } } { “firstname”: “Carol”,“lastname”:“Danvers”} { “create”: { } } { “firstname”: “Wanda”,“lastname”:“Maximoff”} { “create”: { } }

Search

Indexed documents are available for search in near real-time. The following search matches all customers with a first name of Jennifer in the customer index.

GET customer/_search { “query” : { “match” : { “firstname”: “Jennifer” } } }

Explore

You can use Discover in Kibana to interactively search and filter your data. From there, you can start creating visualizations and building and sharing dashboards.

To get started, create a data view that connects to one or more Elasticsearch indices, data streams, or index aliases.

. Go to Management > Stack Management > Kibana > Data Views. . Select Create data view. . Enter a name for the data view and a pattern that matches one or more indices, such as customer. . Select Save data view to Kibana.

To start exploring, go to Analytics > Discover.

[[upgrade]] == Upgrade

To upgrade from an earlier version of Elasticsearch, see the https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/current/setup-upgrade.html[Elasticsearch upgrade documentation].

[[build-source]] == Build from source

Elasticsearch uses https://gradle.org[Gradle] for its build system.

To build a distribution for your local OS and print its output location upon completion, run:

./gradlew localDistro

To build a distribution for another platform, run the related command:

./gradlew :distribution:archives:linux-tar:assemble ./gradlew :distribution:archives:darwin-tar:assemble ./gradlew :distribution:archives:windows-zip:assemble

Distributions are output to distribution/archives.

To run the test suite, see xref:TESTING.asciidoc[TESTING].

[[docs]] == Documentation

For the complete Elasticsearch documentation visit https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/current/index.html[elastic.co].

For information about our documentation processes, see the xref:https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch/blob/main/docs/README.md[docs README].

[[examples]] == Examples and guides

The https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch-labs[elasticsearch-labs] repo contains executable Python notebooks, sample apps, and resources to test out Elasticsearch for vector search, hybrid search and generative AI use cases.

[[contribute]] == Contribute

For contribution guidelines, see xref:CONTRIBUTING.md[CONTRIBUTING].

[[questions]] == Questions? Problems? Suggestions?

• To report a bug or request a feature, create a https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch/issues/new/choose[GitHub Issue]. Please ensure someone else hasn’t created an issue for the same topic.

• Need help using Elasticsearch? Reach out on the https://discuss.elastic.co[Elastic Forum] or https://ela.st/slack[Slack]. A fellow community member or Elastic engineer will be happy to help you out.