Unable to start elasticsearch service

[sitilge (Martins Eglitis)]

Running arch 4.13.12, elasticsearch Version: 6.0.0, Build: 8f0685b/2017-11-10T18:41:22.859Z, JVM: 1.8.0_144

I am unable to # systemctl start elasticsearch. The logs output

elasticsearch.service: PID file /run/elasticsearch/elasticsearch.pid not readable (yet?) after start: No such file or directory

What is the workaround?

[jasontedor]

There is something incredibly fishy here, my gut is that the error message is not really indicative of the problem.

May I ask: how much memory do you have on your system and have you modified the heap settings in /etc/elasticsearch/jvm.options?

[warkolm (Mark Walkom)]

Please also check the full Elasticsearch logs, usually under /var/log/elasticsearch.

[poojagupta]

how did you install elasticsearch? using yum or source code?

[unknown]

I wanted to install elasticsearch on a fresh arch machine and got the same issue too.
installed via:

pacman -S elasticsearch

$ source /etc/profies

When attempting to start via systemd, ES crashed
After looking into elasticsearch.log, i did:

mkdir -p /usr/share/elasticsearch/data/nodes

chmod 777 /usr/share/elasticsearch/data/nodes

Which got the whole thing up and running.
I'm also completely new to ES and feel a bit clueless whether it's an ES or packaging issue.