Permission to elasticsearch config directory

Elastic Stack Elasticsearch
1

Hi,

Is it normal for the elasticsearch config directory to be only accessible using sudo ?

amdin1@amdin1-virtual-machine:~$ cd /etc/elasticsearch
bash: cd: /etc/elasticsearch: Permission denied

The issue is that when setting the path for the .p12 cert, elasticsearch wont start throwing an error Permission denied, unable to access /etc/elasticsearch/certs/node-1.p12

xpack.security.transport.ssl.keystore.path: certs/node-1.p12

ls -l on /etc/ gave this result for the elasticsearch folder

drwxr-s--- 2 root elasticsearch 4096 Apr 10 14:30 elasticsearch

Any help is highly appreciated.

2

How did you install elasticsearch and what OS are you using? How are you running elasticsearch ?

This looks very much related to what happens with your kibana installation with the permission issues in Using https to login to Kibana.

3

How did you install elasticsearch?
https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/current/deb.html

what OS are you using?
Ubuntu 18.04 bionic

How are you running elasticsearch ?
sudo systemctl start elasticsearch.service

Regarding permission issue:

We are asked to save the .p12 in the default config path which is /etc/elasticsearch/

When I cd /etc/elasticsearch/ I got a permission denied, for this the .p12 was not been accessed where it resides on config/certs/node-1.p12

    ./bin/elasticsearch-certutil cert \
    --ca elastic-stack-ca.p12 \ 
    --dns localhost \ 
    --ip 127.0.0.1,::1 
    --out config/certs/node-1.p12

To solve this, the only thing (which is I don't think is a good practice at all, is I've chmod the .p12

sudo chmod 777 node-1.p12

This solved the issue, but I think there is something wrong with permissions, hope you can help in this to avoid such thing in production environment.