Service start fails with chown: invalid user: `kibana:kibana'

[PD_Wanjari]

Installed Kibana with RPM following the instructions from here - https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/kibana/current/rpm.html

I am now trying to start the service using
sudo service kibana start

but I am getting the error -
chown: invalid user: `kibana:kibana'

What should I look at and what needs to be changed/fixed?

Kibana as a direct command using ./bin/kibana works fine

[jbudz (Jon Budzenski)]

Hey @PD_Wanjari, the rpm install scripts create a user named kibana. Prior to starting the server, it'll chown /var/log/kibana.

This start script is located at /etc/init.d/kibana. The install script that adds the user can be referenced at https://github.com/elastic/kibana/blob/master/src/dev/build/tasks/os_packages/package_scripts/post_install.sh#L25.

Did anything go wrong during the installation? I'd give reinstalling a try and if there's any suspicious logs we can dig in. Alternatively if you just need to get things working, manually creating the kibana user and group and and chown -R kibana:kibana /usr/share/kibana and /var/log/kibana should help.

[PD_Wanjari]

I did not see any errors during the installation. What is the best way to clean uninstall and install? I tried rpm -e <file.rpm>, but it says it's not installed.

[lnx]~/workspace/elk% sudo rpm -e kibana-6.3.0-x86_64.rpm
error: package kibana-6.3.0-x86_64.rpm is not installed

[jbudz (Jon Budzenski)]

The installed package's service name is kibana, so something like rpm -e kibana. Hope that helps.