Elasticsearch is a lightning-fast and highly scalable search engine built on top of Apache Lucene. In this article, we’re going to see how we can quickly set it up on an Ubuntu Linux environment (using Ubuntu 16.10 here) to be able to play around with it. We do not cover configuring Elasticsearch or setting up a cluster. To set up Elasticsearch on Windows, see “Setting Up Elasticsearch and Kibana on Windows” instead.

Before we can set up Elasticsearch itself, we need Java. We can follow these instructions to set up Java on Ubuntu. Before proceeding, verify that the JAVA_HOME environment variable is set:

echo $JAVA_HOME

It is likely that you won’t see anything as a result of this command. That’s because while the Java setup instructions do set this environment variable, it does not get applied to your current session. Try opening a new terminal window or reboot the machine, and chances are that your JAVA_HOME will be set correctly. If not, you may have to set JAVA_HOME manually.

Once Java is correctly set up (complete with the JAVA_HOME environment variable), we can proceed to set up Elasticsearch. By going to the Elasticsearch downloads page, we can download (among other things) the Debian package containing Elasticsearch:

We can now install the Debian package using dpkg. At the time of writing this article, the latest version of Elasticsearch is 5.4, so after opening a Terminal window based in the Downloads folder, we can use the following command to install Elasticsearch:

sudo dpkg -i elasticsearch-5.4.0.deb

Elasticsearch is now installed, but it is not yet running! So first, we’ll enable the Elasticsearch service so that it will start automatically when the machine is rebooted:

sudo systemctl enable elasticsearch.service

We can now start the Elasticsearch service.

sudo systemctl start elasticsearch.service

The Elasticsearch HTTP endpoint will need a few seconds before it is reachable. After that, we can verify that Elasticsearch is running either by going to localhost:9200 from a web browser, or by hitting that same endpoint using curl in the command line:

curl -X GET http://localhost:9200/

In either case, you should get a response with some JSON data about the Elasticsearch instance you’re running:

We are now all set up to play around with Elasticsearch! Since we didn’t configure anything, we have a single instance with all default settings. If you’re planning to use Elasticsearch in a production environment, you will of course want to read up on configuring it properly and setting up a cluster to ensure that it can handle the use cases you need and that it can survive failure scenarios.