Elasticsearch service fails immediately after start

[ivan_p (Ivan Protsyuk)]

Hi folks,

The title describes the essense of my problem pretty much. I'm running ES 5.5.2 on a VM with Ubuntu 16.04 (it's VirtualBox 5.2.6).

All files in the /var/log/elasticsearch directory are empty.

journalctl -u elasticsearch shows pairs of lines like

Jan 24 15:13:57 ivan-VirtualBox systemd[1]: Starting Elasticsearch...
Jan 24 15:13:57 ivan-VirtualBox systemd[1]: Started Elasticsearch.

which I guess correspond to my attempts to run the service.

sudo service elasticsearch status shows

● elasticsearch.service - Elasticsearch
   Loaded: loaded (/usr/lib/systemd/system/elasticsearch.service; enabled; vendor preset: enabled)
   Active: inactive (dead) since Mi 2018-01-24 15:13:59 CET; 23min ago
     Docs: http://www.elastic.co
  Process: 7236 ExecStart=/usr/share/elasticsearch/bin/elasticsearch -p ${PID_DIR}/elasticsearch.pid --quiet -Edefault.path.logs=${LOG_DIR} -Edefault.path.data=${DATA_DIR} -Edefault.path.conf=${CONF_DIR} (code=exited, status=0/SUCCESS)
  Process: 7227 ExecStartPre=/usr/share/elasticsearch/bin/elasticsearch-systemd-pre-exec (code=exited, status=0/SUCCESS)
 Main PID: 7236 (code=exited, status=0/SUCCESS)

Jan 24 15:13:57 ivan-VirtualBox systemd[1]: Starting Elasticsearch...
Jan 24 15:13:57 ivan-VirtualBox systemd[1]: Started Elasticsearch.

I'm using java 8 by Oracle. I tried also to purge it and install OpenJDK, but got exactly same behavior.

I also set chown -R elasticsearch:elasticsearch for directories /var/log/elasticsearch, /var/lib/elasticsearch, /var/run/elasticsearch, /etc/elasticsearch.

[ivan_p (Ivan Protsyuk)]

@lauea, sorry, not sure to understand how I can use the image to solve my ES issue.

[lauea (Eason Lau)]

@ivan_p Sorry, I replied wrong topic.

If more log information of es you can provided. Only service elasticsearch status is extremely lack.

[ivan_p (Ivan Protsyuk)]

@lauea, I wish I could provide more info, but as I wrote, all ES log files are empty

[lauea (Eason Lau)]

@ivan_p
here to clarify:

1. How to start the es by you? What's the command?
2. After you started a while, you can try to run below command to check response:

curl localhost:9200

[ivan_p (Ivan Protsyuk)]

I was starting it by sudo service elasticsearch start.
Also, I checked whether any process was listening the 9200 port. Nothing was there.

However, I actually managed to find a workaround for this problem. I upgraded ES from 5.5.2 to 5.6.6, and it started working just fine. Still no clue what the original issue was.