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Curator: Tending your time-series indices in Elasticsearch

Curator

Have time-series indices in Elasticsearch? This is the tool for you!

Like a museum curator manages the exhibits and collections on display, Elasticsearch Curator helps you curate, or manage your time-series indices.

Curator API Documentation (External)

Since Curator 2.0, the API calls and the wrapper script (curator_script.py) have been separated. This allows you to write your own scripts to accomplish similar goals, or even new and different things with the Curator API, and the Elasticsearch Python API.

Curator Script Documentation (GitHub wiki)

The Curator script is a wrapper for the Elasticsearch Curator API, which allows you to manage your indices with commands like:

delete
optimize
close
snapshot
alias

…and more!

See the new Documentation Wiki!

Versioning

There are two branches for development - master and 0.6. Master branch is used to track all the changes for Elasticsearch 1.0 and beyond whereas 0.6 tracks Elasticsearch 0.90 and the corresponding elasticsearch-py version.

Releases with major version 1 (1.X.Y) are to be used with Elasticsearch 1.0 and later, 0.6 releases are meant to work with Elasticsearch 0.90.X.

Usage

Install using pip

pip install elasticsearch-curator

See curator --help for usage specifics.

Defaults

The default values for the following are:

--host localhost
--port 9200
-t (or --timeout) 30
-T (or --time-unit) days
-p (or --prefix) logstash-

The alternate values for -T (or --time-unit) are hours, weeks, and months. You can construct date strings using python strftime formatting. The default --timestrings for these --time-units are as follows:

days:   %Y.%m.%d
hours:  %Y.%m.%d.%H
weeks:  %Y.%W
months: %Y.%m

If your values match these you do not need to include them. The value of prefix should be everything before the date string, i.e. --prefix .marvel- would match index .marvel-2014.05.27, and all other indices beginning with .marvel- (don't forget the trailing hyphen!).

Documentation & Examples

See the Curator Wiki on Github for more documentation

Commands

• alias - Add/Remove indices from existing aliases
• allocation - Add a 'require' tag to indices for routing allocation
• bloom - Disable bloom filter cache for expired indices
• close - Close indices
• delete - Delete indices
• optimize - Optimize (Lucene forceMerge) indices
• show - Show indices or snapshots
• snapshot - Snapshot indices to existing repository

Timeouts

With some operations (e.g. optimize and snapshot) the default behavior is to wait until the operation is complete before proceeding with the next step. Since these operations can take quite a long time it is advisable to set --timeout to a high value. If you do not specify, a default of 6 hours will be applied (21,600 seconds).

Contributing

• fork the repo
• make changes in your fork
• run tests
• send a pull request!

Running tests

To run the test suite just run python setup.py test

When changing code, contributing new code or fixing a bug please make sure you include tests in your PR (or mark it as without tests so that someone else can pick it up to add the tests). When fixing a bug please make sure the test actually tests the bug - it should fail without the code changes and pass after they're applied (it can still be one commit of course).

The tests will try to connect to your local elasticsearch instance and run integration tests against it. This will delete all the data stored there! You can use the env variable TEST_ES_SERVER to point to a different instance (for example 'otherhost:9203').

The repository tests all expect to run on a single local node. These tests will fail if run against a cluster due to the unhappy mixup between unit tests and shared filesystems (total cleanup afterwards). It is possible, but you would have to manually replace /tmp/REPOSITORY_LOCATION with a path on your shared filesystem. This is defined in test_curator/integration/__init__.py

Origins

Curator was first called clearESindices.py [1] and was almost immediately renamed to logstash_index_cleaner.py [1]. After a time it was migrated under the logstash repository as expire_logs. Soon thereafter, Jordan Sissel was hired by Elasticsearch, as was the original author of this tool. It became Elasticsearch Curator after that and is now hosted at https://github.com/elasticsearch/curator

[1] https://logstash.jira.com/browse/LOGSTASH-211