Oracle Linux - build Elasticsearch network.host configuration

With the latest version of Elasticsearch the directives used to ensure your Elasticsearch daemon is listening to the correct interfaces on your Linux machine have changed. By default Elasticsearch will listen on your local interface only which is a bit useless in most cases.

Whenever deploying Elasticsearch manually it will not be a problem to configure it manually, however, we are moving more and more to a world where deployments are done fully automatic. In case you use fully automatic deployment and depend on bash scripting to do some of the tasks for you the below scripts will be handy to use.

In my case I used the below scripts to automatically configure Elasticsearch on Oracle Linux 6 instances to listen on all available interfaces to ensure that Elasticsearch is directly useable for external servers and users.

To ensure your Elasticsearch daemon is listening on all ports you will have to ensure the below line is available, at least in my case as I have 2 external and one local loopback interface in my instance.

network.host: _eth0_,_eth1_,_local_

When you are sure your machine will always have 2 external network interfaces and one local loopback interface you want Elasticsearch to listen on you could hardcode this. However, if you want to make a more generic and stable solution you should read the interface names and build this configuration line.

The ifconfig command will give you the interfaces in a human readable format which is not very useable in a programmatic manner. However, ifconfig will provide you the required output which means we can use it in combination with sed to get a list of the interface names only. The below example shows this:

[root@localhost tmp]# ifconfig -a |sed 's/[ \t].*//;/^\(lo\|\)$/d'
eth0
eth1
[root@localhost tmp]#

However, this is not in the format we want it, so we have to create a small script to make sure we do get it more in the format we want it. The below code example can be used for this:

#!/bin/bash

  for OUTPUT in $(ifconfig -a |sed 's/[ \t].*//;/^\(lo\|\)$/d')
  do
   echo "_"$OUTPUT"_"
  done

If we execute this we will have the following result:

[root@localhost tmp]# ./test.sh
_eth0_
_eth1_
[root@localhost tmp]#

As you can see it is looking more like how we want to have this as input for the Elasticsearch configuration file however we are not fully done. First of all the _local_ is missing and we still have it in a multi-line representation. The below code example shows the full script you can use to build the configuration line. We have added the _local_ and we use awk to make sure it is one comma separated line you can use.

#!/bin/bash
 {
  for OUTPUT in $(ifconfig -a |sed 's/[ \t].*//;/^\(lo\|\)$/d')
  do
   echo "_"$OUTPUT"_"
  done
echo "_local_"
 } | awk -vORS=, '{ print $1 }' | sed 's/,$/\n/'

If we run the above code we will get the below result:

[root@localhost tmp]# ./test.sh
_eth0_,_eth1_,_local_
[root@localhost tmp]#

You can use this in a more wider script to ensure it is written (including network.host:) to the /etc/elasticsearch/elasticsearch.yml file which is used by Elasticsearch as the main configuration file. As stated, I used this script and tested in while deploying Elasticsearch on Oracle Linux 6. It is expected to be working on other Linux distributions however it has not been tested.