rlugojr / cookbook-elasticsearch

Chef cookbook for Elasticsearch

Elasticsearch Chef Cookbook

Pre-requisites & Supported Versions

Java Runtime - This cookbook requires java, but does not provide it. Please install Java before using any recipe in this cookbook. Please also note that Elasticsearch itself has specific minimum Java version requirements. We recommend this cookbook to install Java.

Elasticsearch - This cookbook is being written and tested to support Elasticsearch 5.x and greater. If you must have a cookbook that works with older versions of Elasticsearch, please test and then pin to a specific, older major.minor version of this cookbook and only leave the patch release to float. Older versions can be found via Git tags or on Chef Supermarket. We also maintain bugfix branches for major released lines (0.x, 1.x, 2.x) of this cookbook so that we can still release fixes for older cookbooks.

Chef - The latest release of this cookbook is intended to support the three most recent releases of Chef, and tests against those. Earlier versions may also be supported, though we suggest that you use Chef 12.x at a minimum. It implements support for CI as well as more modern testing with chefspec and test-kitchen. It no longer supports some of the more extraneous features such as discovery (use chef search in your wrapper cookbook) or EBS device creation (use the aws cookbook).

Previous versions of this cookbook may be found using the git tags on this repository.

Upgrading Elasticsearch in place is not recommended, and generally not supported by this cookbook. We strongly recommend you pin versions of Elasticsearch and spin up new servers to migrate to a new version, one node at a time. This cookbook does not generally set destructive options like asking the package manager to overwrite configuration files without prompting, either.

Attributes

Please consult attributes/default.rb for a large list of checksums for many different archives and package files of different elasticsearch versions. Both recipes and resources/providers here use those default values.

You may use %s in your URL and this cookbook will use sprintf/format to insert the version parameter as a string into your download_url.

Name	Default	Other values
default['elasticsearch']['download_urls']['debian']	See values.	%s will be replaced with the version attribute above
default['elasticsearch']['download_urls']['rhel']	See values.	%s will be replaced with the version attribute above
default['elasticsearch']['download_urls']['tarball']	See values.	%s will be replaced with the version attribute above

This cookbook's elasticsearch::default recipe also supports setting any elasticsearch_ resource using attributes:

default['elasticsearch']['user'] = {}
default['elasticsearch']['install'] = {}
default['elasticsearch']['configure'] = {}
default['elasticsearch']['service'] = {}
default['elasticsearch']['plugin'] = {}

For example, this will pass a username 'foo' to elasticsearch_user and set a uid to 1234:

default['elasticsearch']['user']['username'] = 'foo'
default['elasticsearch']['user']['uid'] = '1234'

Recipes

Resources are the intended way to consume this cookbook, however we have provided a single recipe that configures Elasticsearch by downloading an archive containing a distribution of Elasticsearch, and extracting that into /usr/share.

See the attributes section above to for what defaults you can adjust.

default

The default recipe creates an elasticsearch user, group, package installation, configuration files, and service with all of the default options.

Please note that there are additional examples within the test fixtures, including a demonstration of how to configure two instances of Elasticsearch on a single server.

Resources

Notifications and Service Start/Restart

The resources provided in this cookbook do not automatically restart services when changes have occurred. They do start services by default when configuring a new service This has been done to protect you from accidental data loss and service outages, as nodes might restart simultaneously or may not restart at all when bad configuration values are supplied.

elasticsearch_service has a special service_actions parameter you can use to specify what state the underlying service should be in on each chef run (defaults to :enabled and :started). It will also pass through all of the standard service resource actions to the underlying service resource if you wish to notify it.

You must supply your desired notifications when using each resource if you want Chef to automatically restart services. Again, we don't recommend this unless you know what you're doing.

Resource names

Many of the resources provided in this cookbook need to share configuration values. For example, the elasticsearch_service resource needs to know the path to the configuration file(s) generated by elasticsearch_configure and the path to the actual ES binary installed by elasticsearch_install. And they both need to know the appropriate system user and group defined by elasticsearch_user.

Search order: In order to make this easy, all resources in this cookbook use the following search order to locate resources that apply to the same overall Elasticsearch setup:

1. Resources that share the same resource name
2. Resources that share the same value for instance_name
3. Resources named default or resources named elasticsearch
   • This fails if both default and elasticsearch resources exist

Examples of more complicated resource names are left to the reader, but here we present a typical example that should work in most cases:

elasticsearch_user 'elasticsearch'
elasticsearch_install 'elasticsearch'
elasticsearch_configure 'elasticsearch'
elasticsearch_service 'elasticsearch'
elasticsearch_plugin 'x-pack'

elasticsearch_user

Actions: :create, :remove

Creates a user and group on the system for use by elasticsearch. Here is an example with many of the default options and default values (all options except a resource name may be omitted).

Examples:

elasticsearch_user 'elasticsearch'

elasticsearch_user 'elasticsearch' do
  username 'elasticsearch'
  groupname 'elasticsearch'
  shell '/bin/bash'
  comment 'Elasticsearch User'

  action :create
end

elasticsearch_install

Actions: :install, :remove

Downloads the elasticsearch software, and unpacks it on the system. There are currently three ways to install -- 'repository' (the default), which creates an apt or yum repo and installs from there, 'package', which downloads the appropriate package from elasticsearch.org and uses the package manager to install it, and 'tarball' which downloads a tarball from elasticsearch.org and unpacks it. This resource also comes with a :remove action which will remove the package or directory elasticsearch was unpacked into.

You may always specify a download_url and/or download_checksum, and you may include %s which will be replaced by the version parameter you supply.

Please be sure to consult the above attribute section as that controls how Elasticsearch version, download URL and checksum are determined if you omit them.

Examples:

elasticsearch_install 'elasticsearch'

elasticsearch_install 'my_es_installation' do
  type 'package' # type of install
  version '5.2.0'
  action :install # could be :remove as well
end

elasticsearch_install 'my_es_installation' do
  type 'tarball' # type of install
  dir tarball: '/usr/local' # where to install

  download_url "https://download.elasticsearch.org/elasticsearch/elasticsearch/elasticsearch-1.7.2.tar.gz"
  # sha256
  download_checksum "6f81935e270c403681e120ec4395c28b2ddc87e659ff7784608b86beb5223dd2"

  action :install # could be :remove as well
end

elasticsearch_install 'my_es_installation' do
  type 'tarball' # type of install
  version '5.2.0'
  action :install # could be :remove as well
end

elasticsearch_install 'my_es_installation' do
  type 'package' # type of install
  download_url "https://download.elasticsearch.org/elasticsearch/elasticsearch/elasticsearch-1.7.2.deb"
  # sha256
  download_checksum "791fb9f2131be2cf8c1f86ca35e0b912d7155a53f89c2df67467ca2105e77ec2"
  instance_name 'elasticsearch'
  action :install # could be :remove as well
end

elasticsearch_configure

Actions: :manage, :remove

Configures an elasticsearch instance; creates directories for configuration, logs, and data. Writes files log4j2.properties, elasticsearch.in.sh and elasticsearch.yml.

The main attribute for this resource is configuration, which is a hash of any elasticsearch configuration directives. The other important attribute is default_configuration -- this contains the minimal set of required defaults.

Note that these are both not a Chef mash, everything must be in a single level of keys and values. Any settings you pass in configuration will be merged into (and potentially overwrite) any default settings.

See the examples, as well as the attributes in the resource file, for more.

Examples:

With all defaults -

elasticsearch_configure 'elasticsearch'

With mostly defaults -

elasticsearch_configure 'elasticsearch' do
    allocated_memory '512m'
    configuration ({
      'cluster.name' => 'escluster',
      'node.name' => 'node01',
      'http.port' => 9201
    })
end

Very complicated -

elasticsearch_configure 'my_elasticsearch' do
  # if you override one of these, you probably want to override all
  path_home     "/opt/elasticsearch"
  path_conf     "/etc/opt/elasticsearch"
  path_data     "/var/opt/elasticsearch"
  path_logs     "/var/log/elasticsearch"
  path_pid      "/var/run/elasticsearch"
  path_plugins  "/opt/elasticsearch/plugins"
  path_bin      "/opt/elasticsearch/bin"

  logging({:"action" => 'INFO'})

  allocated_memory '123m'

  jvm_options %w(
                -XX:+UseParNewGC
                -XX:+UseConcMarkSweepGC
                -XX:CMSInitiatingOccupancyFraction=75
                -XX:+UseCMSInitiatingOccupancyOnly
                -XX:+HeapDumpOnOutOfMemoryError
                -XX:+PrintGCDetails
              )

  configuration ({
    'node.name' => 'crazy'
  })

  action :manage
end

elasticsearch_service

Actions: :configure, :remove

Writes out a system service configuration of the appropriate type, and enables it to start on boot. You can override almost all of the relevant settings in such a way that you may run multiple instances. Most settings will be taken from a matching elasticsearch_config resource in the collection.

elasticsearch_service 'elasticsearch'

elasticsearch_plugin

Actions: :install, :remove

Installs or removes a plugin to a given elasticsearch instance and plugin directory. Please note that there is currently no way to upgrade an existing plugin using commandline tools, so we haven't exposed that feature here either. Furthermore, there isn't a way to determine if a plugin is compatible with ES or even what version it is. So once we install a plugin to a directory, we generally assume that is the desired one and we don't touch it further.

See sous-chefs#264 for more info. NB: You may encounter issues on certain distros with NSS 3.16.1 and OpenJDK 7.x.

Officially supported or commercial plugins require just the plugin name:

elasticsearch_plugin 'analysis-icu' do
  action :install
end
elasticsearch_plugin 'shield' do
  action :install
end

Plugins from GitHub require a URL of 'username/repository' or 'username/repository/version':

elasticsearch_plugin 'kopf' do
  url 'lmenezes/elasticsearch-kopf'
  action :install
end

elasticsearch_plugin 'kopf' do
  url 'lmenezes/elasticsearch-kopf/1.5.7'
  action :install
end

Plugins from Maven Central or Sonatype require 'groupId/artifactId/version':

elasticsearch_plugin 'mapper-attachments' do
  url 'org.elasticsearch/elasticsearch-mapper-attachments/2.6.0'
  action :install
end

Plugins can be installed from a custom URL or file location as follows:

elasticsearch_plugin 'mapper-attachments' do
  url 'http://some.domain.name//my-plugin-1.0.0.zip'
  action :install
end

elasticsearch_plugin 'mapper-attachments' do
  url 'file:/path/to/my-plugin-1.0.0.zip'
  action :install
end

The plugin resource respects the https_proxy or http_proxy (non-SSL) Chef settings unless explicitly disabled using chef_proxy false:

elasticsearch_plugin 'kopf' do
  url 'lmenezes/elasticsearch-kopf'
  chef_proxy false
  action :install
end

To run multiple instances per machine, an explicit plugin_dir location has to be provided:

elasticsearch_plugin 'x-pack' do
  plugin_dir '/usr/share/elasticsearch_foo/plugins'
end

If for some reason, you want to name the resource something else, you may provide the true plugin name using the plugin_name parameter:

elasticsearch_plugin 'xyzzy' do
  plugin_name 'kopf'
  url 'lmenezes/elasticsearch-kopf'
  action :install
end

Testing

This cookbook is equipped with both unit tests (chefspec) and integration tests (test-kitchen and serverspec). It also comes with rubocop and foodcritic tasks in the supplied Rakefile. Contributions to this cookbook should include tests for new features or bugfixes, with a preference for unit tests over integration tests to ensure speedy testing runs. All tests and most other commands here should be run using bundler and our standard Gemfile. This ensures that contributions and changes are made in a standardized way against the same versions of gems. We recommend installing rubygems-bundler so that bundler is automatically inserting bundle exec in front of commands run in a directory that contains a Gemfile.

A full test run of all tests and style checks would look like:

$ bundle exec rake style
$ bundle exec rake spec
$ bundle exec rake integration
$ bundle exec rake destroy

The final destroy is intended to clean up any systems that failed a test, and is mostly useful when running with kitchen drivers for cloud providers, so that no machines are left orphaned and costing you money.

Fixtures

This cookbook supplies a few different test fixtures (under test/fixtures/) that can be shared amongst any number of unit or integration tests: cookbooks, environments, and nodes. Environments and nodes are automatically loaded into chef-zero for both chefspec tests that run locally and serverspec tests that run from test-kitchen.

It also contains 'platform data' that can be used to drive unit testing, for example, you might read httpd for some platforms and apache2 for others, allowing you to write a single test for the Apache webserver. Unfortunately, without further modifications to busser and busser-serverspec, the platform data will not be available to serverspec tests.

Style and Best Practices

Rubocop and Foodcritic evaluations may be made by running rake style. There are no overrides for foodcritic rules, however the adjustments to rubocop are made using the supplied .rubocop.yml file and have been documented by comments within. Most notably, rubocop has been restricted to only apply to .rb files.

Rubocop and foodcritic tests can be executed using rake style.

Unit testing

Unit testing is done using the latest versions of Chefspec. The current default test layout includes running against all supported platforms, as well as stubbing data into chef-zero. This allows us to also test against chef search. As is currently a best practice in the community, we will avoid the use of chef-solo, but not create barriers to explicitly fail for chef-solo.

Unit tests can be executed using rake spec.

Integration testing

Integration testing is accomplished using the latest versions of test-kitchen and serverspec. Currently, this cookbook uses the busser-serverspec plugin for copying serverspec files to the system being tested. There is some debate in the community about whether this should be done using busser-rspec instead, and each busser plugin has a slightly different feature set.

While the default test-kitchen configuration uses the vagrant driver, you may override this using ~/.kitchen/config.yml or by placing a .kitchen.local.yml in the current directory. This allows you to run these integration tests using any supported test-kitchen driver (ec2, rackspace, docker, etc).

Integration tests can be executed using rake integration or kitchen test.

License

This software is licensed under the Apache 2 license, quoted below.

Copyright (c) 2015 Elasticsearch <https://www.elastic.co/>

Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License");
you may not use this file except in compliance with the License.
You may obtain a copy of the License at

   http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0

Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software
distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS,
WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied.
See the License for the specific language governing permissions and
limitations under the License.