Failed to restart elasticsearch

Question

I have elasticsearch version 2.3.3 installed on a vm with ubuntu version 14.04. I have tried to restart the elasticsearch service but after the restart I checked the status with sudo service elasticsearch status and it returned * elasticsearch is not running. When I try to start it using sudo service elasticsearch start it returns * Starting Elasticsearch Server but checking the status it turns out to be not running.

I have tried to manually start it by entering /usr/share/elasticsearch/bin/elasticsearch (which is the path of the binary file) but at the beginning I was getting the following error:

Exception in thread "main" ElasticsearchException[Failed to load logging configuration]; nested: NoSuchFileException[/usr/share/elasticsearch/config];
Likely root cause: java.nio.file.NoSuchFileException: /usr/share/elasticsearch/config
    at sun.nio.fs.UnixException.translateToIOException(UnixException.java:86)
    at sun.nio.fs.UnixException.rethrowAsIOException(UnixException.java:102)
    at sun.nio.fs.UnixException.rethrowAsIOException(UnixException.java:107)
    at sun.nio.fs.UnixFileAttributeViews$Basic.readAttributes(UnixFileAttributeViews.java:55)
    at sun.nio.fs.UnixFileSystemProvider.readAttributes(UnixFileSystemProvider.java:144)
    at sun.nio.fs.LinuxFileSystemProvider.readAttributes(LinuxFileSystemProvider.java:97)
    at java.nio.file.Files.readAttributes(Files.java:1686)
    at java.nio.file.FileTreeWalker.walk(FileTreeWalker.java:109)
    at java.nio.file.FileTreeWalker.walk(FileTreeWalker.java:69)
    at java.nio.file.Files.walkFileTree(Files.java:2602)
    at org.elasticsearch.common.logging.log4j.LogConfigurator.resolveConfig(LogConfigurator.java:142)
    at org.elasticsearch.common.logging.log4j.LogConfigurator.configure(LogConfigurator.java:103)
    at org.elasticsearch.bootstrap.Bootstrap.init(Bootstrap.java:243)
    at org.elasticsearch.bootstrap.Elasticsearch.main(Elasticsearch.java:35)
Refer to the log for complete error details.

The error tells it is not able to find the logging configuration so I followed the advice in https://github.com/elastic/ansible-elasticsearch/issues/58 by creating a symbolic link: sudo ln -s /etc/elasticsearch/ /usr/share/elasticsearch/config

Afterwards I'm getting the following error when running elastic search through /usr/share/elasticsearch/bin/elasticsearch:

Exception in thread "main" ElasticsearchException[Failed to load logging configuration]; nested: AccessDeniedException[/usr/share/elasticsearch/config];
Likely root cause: java.nio.file.AccessDeniedException: /usr/share/elasticsearch/config
    at sun.nio.fs.UnixException.translateToIOException(UnixException.java:84)
    at sun.nio.fs.UnixException.rethrowAsIOException(UnixException.java:102)
    at sun.nio.fs.UnixException.rethrowAsIOException(UnixException.java:107)
    at sun.nio.fs.UnixFileSystemProvider.newDirectoryStream(UnixFileSystemProvider.java:426)
    at java.nio.file.Files.newDirectoryStream(Files.java:413)
    at java.nio.file.FileTreeWalker.walk(FileTreeWalker.java:179)
    at java.nio.file.FileTreeWalker.walk(FileTreeWalker.java:69)
    at java.nio.file.Files.walkFileTree(Files.java:2602)
    at org.elasticsearch.common.logging.log4j.LogConfigurator.resolveConfig(LogConfigurator.java:142)
    at org.elasticsearch.common.logging.log4j.LogConfigurator.configure(LogConfigurator.java:103)
    at org.elasticsearch.bootstrap.Bootstrap.init(Bootstrap.java:243)
    at org.elasticsearch.bootstrap.Elasticsearch.main(Elasticsearch.java:35)
Refer to the log for complete error details.

When trying as root (sudo /usr/share/elasticsearch/bin/elasticsearch) I get the following error:

Exception in thread "main" java.lang.RuntimeException: don't run elasticsearch as root.
    at org.elasticsearch.bootstrap.Bootstrap.initializeNatives(Bootstrap.java:93)
    at org.elasticsearch.bootstrap.Bootstrap.setup(Bootstrap.java:144)
    at org.elasticsearch.bootstrap.Bootstrap.init(Bootstrap.java:270)
    at org.elasticsearch.bootstrap.Elasticsearch.main(Elasticsearch.java:35)
Refer to the log for complete error details.

This is not the first time I face this issue. I faced exactly the same problem (with the first exception - logging config not found) on another virtual machine and tried to solve it by creating the path /usr/share/elasticsearch/config and copying the config files (elasticsearch.yml and logging.yml) to it. Afterwards I faced the second problem again (running as normal user - access denied and running as root is not allowed).

Does anybody have an idea about this problem? Any help will be appretiated!

Answer 1

In my case the following link helped :

ln -s /etc/elasticsearch/ /usr/share/elasticsearch/config

Answer 2

Have you tried to do the following:

1) Create the directories

$ mkdir -p /usr/share/elasticsearch/config/scripts

2) Copying over log and config files

$ cp /etc/elasticsearch/elasticsearch.yml /user/share/elasticshare/config
$ cp /etc/elasticsearch/logging.yml /user/share/elasticshare/config

3) Change permissions or change ownership on these files.

$ sudo chmod g+rwx /usr/share/elasticsearch/config/elasticsearch.yml /usr/share/elasticsearch/config/logging.yml 
$ sudo chmod o+rwx /usr/share/elasticsearch/config/elasticsearch.yml /usr/share/elasticsearch/config/logging.yml