Run Elasticsearch 7 with Homebrew

I've had some trouble getting Elasticsearch 7.x running on my Mac, due to the default configuration not working as is. Here's what I did to get it working.

Install the Official Release

Note that 7.x has not been released on the official Homebrew repository yet, mainly because it seems to conflict with some other packages. So you might not necessarily want to run 7.x.

If you do, make sure to remove your existing Elasticsearch instance:

brew services stop elasticsearch
brew uninstall elasticsearch

And delete all your existing data (assuming it is not important):

rm -rf /usr/local/var/lib/elasticsearch/

Elasticsearch offers its own Homebrew tap for Elasticsearch, which can be installed as follows:

brew tap elastic/tap
brew install elastic/tap/elasticsearch-full

Fix the Configuration

After installing Elasticsearch, it won't start without some configuration changes. I had to set xpack.ml.enabled: false in my elasticsearch.yml.

You can find the config in /usr/local/etc/elasticsearch/.

The full config that I use is as follows:

# may be master and may hold data
node.name: elasticsearch
node.master: true
node.data: true
node.ml: false
xpack.ml.enabled: false

# Elasticsearch has no security whatsoever, do not expose to 0.0.0.0!
network.host: localhost

# node communication
transport.tcp.port: 9300

# rest api
http.port: 9200

# run as single node
discovery.type: single-node

# Disable auto creation of indices (except for some which Elasticsearch requires)
action.auto_create_index: ".security*,.monitoring*,.watches,.triggered_watches,.watcher-history*,.ml*"

Of course your requirements may vary, so things like index auto creation might look different on your instance. But at least this gets the instance running with the following command:

elasticsearch

Or in the background:

brew services start elasticsearch