elasticsearch-head

A web front end for an Elasticsearch cluster

http://mobz.github.io/elasticsearch-head

Running

There are multiple ways of running elasticsearch-head.

Running with built in server

• git clone git://github.com/mobz/elasticsearch-head.git
• cd elasticsearch-head
• npm install
• npm run start

• open http://localhost:9100/

This will start a local webserver running on port 9100 serving elasticsearch-head

Running with docker

• for Elasticsearch 5.x: docker run -p 9100:9100 mobz/elasticsearch-head:5
• for Elasticsearch 2.x: docker run -p 9100:9100 mobz/elasticsearch-head:2
• for Elasticsearch 1.x: docker run -p 9100:9100 mobz/elasticsearch-head:1
• for fans of alpine there is mobz/elasticsearch-head:5-alpine

• open http://localhost:9100/

Running as a Chrome extension

• Install ElasticSearch Head from the Chrome Web Store.
• Click the extension icon in the toolbar of your web browser.
• Note that you don’t need to enable CORS with this method.

Running as a plugin of Elasticsearch (deprecated)

• for Elasticsearch 5.x, 6.x, and 7.x: site plugins are not supported. Run as a standalone server
• for Elasticsearch 2.x: sudo elasticsearch/bin/plugin install mobz/elasticsearch-head
• for Elasticsearch 1.x: sudo elasticsearch/bin/plugin -install mobz/elasticsearch-head/1.x
• for Elasticsearch 0.x: sudo elasticsearch/bin/plugin -install mobz/elasticsearch-head/0.9

• open http://localhost:9200/_plugin/head/

This will automatically download the appropriate version of elasticsearch-head from github and run it as a plugin within the elasticsearch cluster. In this mode elasticsearch-head automatically connects to the node that is running it

Running with the local proxy

This is an experimental feature which creates a local proxy for many remote elasticsearch clusters

• configure clusters in proxy/clusters
• create a file per remote cluster you want to connect to ( see localhost9200.json as example )
• requires node >= 6.0
• npm install
• npm run proxy

At the moment it only works with grunt server running on http://localhost:9100

Alternatives

• File System: elastisearch-head is a standalone webapp written in good-ol’ html5. This means, you can put it up on any webserver, run it directly from the filesystem. It’ll even fit on a floppy disk.
• DEB package: There is an unofficial deb package. the plugin executable will be available at /usr/share/elasticsearch/bin/plugin.
• Homebrew: There is an unofficial keg. The plugin executable will be available at /usr/local/Cellar/elasticsearch/(elasticsearch version)/libexec/bin/plugin.

Connecting to elasticsearch

By default elasticsearch exposes a http rest API on port 9200 which elasticsearch-head connects to.

Enable CORS in elasticsearch

When not running as a Chrome extension or as a plugin of elasticsearch (which is not even possible from version 5), you must enable CORS in elasticsearch, or else your browser will reject elasticsearch-head’s requests due to violation of the same-origin policy.

In elasticsearch configuration;

• add http.cors.enabled: true
• you must also set http.cors.allow-origin because no origin allowed by default. http.cors.allow-origin: "*" is valid value, however it’s considered as a security risk as your cluster is open to cross origin from anywhere.

Basic Authentication

elasticsearch-head will add basic auth headers to each request if you pass in the correct url parameters
You will also need to add http.cors.allow-headers: Authorization to the elasticsearch configuration

x-pack

elasticsearch x-pack requires basic authentication and CORS as described above. Make sure you have the correct CORS setup and then open es-head with a url like “http://localhost:9100/?auth_user=elastic&auth_password=changeme”

URL Parameters

Parameters may be appended to the url to set an initial state eg. head/index.html?base_uri=http://node-01.example.com:9200

• base_uri force elasticsearch-head to connect to a particular node.
• dashboard experimental feature to open elasticsearch-head in a mode suitable for dashboard / radiator. Accepts one parameter dashboard=cluster
• auth_user adds basic auth credentials to http requests ( requires elasticsearch-http-basic plugin or a reverse proxy )
• auth_password basic auth password as above (note: without additional security layers, passwords are sent over the network in the clear )
• lang force elasticsearch-head to use specified ui language (eg: en, fr, pt, zh, zh-TW, tr, ja)

Contributing

To contribute to elasticsearch-head you will need the following developer tools

1. git and a github account
2. node
3. grunt-cli
4. (to run jasmine tests) phantomjs

Then

1. create a fork of elasticsearch-head on github
2. clone your fork to your machine
3. cd elasticsearch-head
4. npm install # downloads node dev dependencies
5. grunt dev # builds the distribution files, then watches the src directory for changes (if you have an warning like "Warning: Task “clean” failed. Use —force to continue.", well use —force ;) )

Changes to both _site and src directories must be committed, to allow people to
run elasticsearch-head without running dev tools and follow existing dev patterns,
such as indenting with tabs.

Contributing an Internationalisation

• Simplified Chinese by darkcount
• Traditional Chinese by kewang
• English (primary) by Ben Birch
• French by David Pilato
• Portuguese by caiodangelo
• Turkish by Cemre Mengu
• Japanese by Satoshi Kimura

To contribute an internationalisation

1. Follow “Contributing” instructions above
2. Find your 2-character ISO 639-1 language code
3. edit site/index.html to add your 2 letter language code to the data-langs attribute of this line @here">@
4. make a copy of src/app/langs/en_strings.js prefixed with your language code
5. convert english strings and fragments to your language. Formatting Rules
6. Submit a pull request