How to install ElasticSearch on Lubuntu 16.04

Elasticsearch is an open-source search engine built on top of Apache Lucene, a full-text search engine library. In this article i will show you how to install elasticsearch on lubuntu 16.04.

I don't want to talk deeply about what is elasticsearch and why you want to use it, i assume you already know what elasticsearch is and this article is about how to install elasticsearch on lubuntu 16.04 operating system.

Step by step how to install elasticsearch on lubuntu 16.04

• install java on lubuntu 16.04, you can use oracle JDK or open JDK, up to you.
• download the latest elasticsearch debian package (.deb) from elasticsearch website
• open terminal, go to the debian package located, and then run this command :

sudo dpkg -i elasticsearch-2.3.3.deb

• run the elasticsearch service

sudo service elasticsearch start

• run curl to elasticsearch to make sure it is alive 

curl 'http://localhost:9200/?pretty'

If the elasticsearch service is indeed up and running, you will see something similar like this when running the curl command:

{
  "name" : "Mekano",
  "cluster_name" : "elasticsearch",
  "version" : {
    "number" : "2.3.3",
    "build_hash" : "218bdf10790eef486ff2c41a3df5cfa32dadcfde",
    "build_timestamp" : "2016-05-17T15:40:04Z",
    "build_snapshot" : false,
    "lucene_version" : "5.5.0"
  },
  "tagline" : "You Know, for Search"
}

As you can see i'm running elasticsearch version 2.3.3 with the name 'Mekano' and cluster name 'elasticsearch', yours might be different, but you get the idea right?

The localhost port 9200 is the default url and port number for elasticsearch, this one should be the same for any elasticsearch installation on local computer, unless you changed it.

Now that you have elasticsearch server running on your local machine, next lessons i will show you how to install tools for elasticsearch such as kibana and sense to make your life easier when working with elasticsearch.