Linux System User Elasticsearch

Elastic Stack Elasticsearch
1

I’m pretty sure I installed v9.0.2 from a tarball on an ubuntu fork, so I didn’t automatically get a no-login user created to run a systemd unit. Are there any elasticsearch specific things I need to know about creating a no-login user to run elasticsearch as? Just created a systemd unit for elasticsearch.

2

If you use ES from tarball no Linux user will be created. Only installation packages create Linux users.

In the service mode - systemd, user(manually create) which starts ES, must have permissions to:

  • create/modify files where are data and logs.
    path.data: /path/data
    path.logs: /path/log/
  • read certificates for network and https communication
  • create/modify files where is repository for snapshot/backup:
    path.repo: /path2/backups

The production environment needs additional configuration. In general to start ES it's enough to extract, set elasticsearch.yml and run it.

3

You can also just look at the pre and post install steps that a RPM/deb installation does. e.g. under ubuntu

$ apt install elasticsearch --download-only
$ mkdir /tmp/test
$ cd /tmp/test
$ dpkg-deb -e  /var/cache/apt/archives/elasticsearch_9.2.3_amd64.deb
$ find . -type f
./DEBIAN/postrm
./DEBIAN/prerm
./DEBIAN/md5sums
./DEBIAN/conffiles
./DEBIAN/preinst
./DEBIAN/postinst
./DEBIAN/control