The Open Distro project is archived. Open Distro development has moved to OpenSearch. The Open Distro plugins will continue to work with legacy versions of Elasticsearch OSS, but we recommend upgrading to OpenSearch to take advantage of the latest features and improvements.
Elasticsearch configuration
Most Elasticsearch configuration can take place in the cluster settings API. Certain operations require you to modify elasticsearch.yml and restart the cluster.
Whenever possible, use the cluster settings API instead; elasticsearch.yml is local to each node, whereas the API applies the setting to all nodes in the cluster.
Cluster settings API
The first step in changing a setting is to view the current settings:
GET _cluster/settings?include_defaults=true
For a more concise summary of non-default settings:
GET _cluster/settings
Three categories of setting exist in the cluster settings API: persistent, transient, and default. Persistent settings, well, persist after a cluster restart. After a restart, Elasticsearch clears transient settings.
If you specify the same setting in multiple places, Elasticsearch uses the following precedence:
- Transient settings
- Persistent settings
- Settings from
elasticsearch.yml - Default settings
To change a setting, just specify the new one as either persistent or transient. This example shows the flat settings form:
PUT /_cluster/settings
{
"persistent" : {
"action.auto_create_index" : false
}
}
You can also use the expanded form, which lets you copy and paste from the GET response and change existing values:
PUT /_cluster/settings
{
"persistent": {
"action": {
"auto_create_index": false
}
}
}
Configuration file
You can find elasticsearch.yml in /usr/share/elasticsearch/config/elasticsearch.yml (Docker) or /etc/elasticsearch/elasticsearch.yml (RPM and DEB) on each node.
The demo configuration includes a number of settings for the security plugin that you should modify before using Open Distro for a production workload. To learn more, see Security.