This blog contains a guide on how to deploy a small Elasticsearch cluster for testing and development purposes on a windows host using Docker.
- If you haven’t already, follow the steps at docker.com to download and install docker.
- Using command prompt (type ‘cmd’ from the windows search bar), use the docker network create command and name your network elastic. Opening cmd from search should place you in your user folder where you can run or edit the docker file. If for any reason it opens in a different directory use the ‘cd’ command to navigate to your user directly (cd C:\Users\demo1).
- Use the ‘docker pull’ command to download the latest Elasticsearch container.
- Once the Elasticsearch container is successfully downloaded. Initiate the container with the following ‘run’ command. Once complete, the output will contain your elastic password and an enrolment token for Kibana so that you can join it to the Elasticsearch instance.
- Copy the SSL cert from the docker to your local machine.
- Download and run the container for Kibana.
- When Kibana starts, a link will be generated (Go to http://localhost:5601/?code=471795 to get started). Opening this in your browser will give you the portal to paste your enrolment token from the Elasticsearch.
- Welcome to Elasticsearch. Log in with the username: elastic and the password generated when you started the Elasticsearch container. For now skip ‘Add integrations’ and go to ‘Explore on my own’.
- There are several demo datasets complete with visualisations that can be quickly added for training purposes. You can use these datasets to learn the Kibana Query Language (KQL) to get to grips with searching this data in the discover application.
- When you have finished testing conduct the following clean up tasks. Stop Kibana and Elasticsearch, remove the Elastic network and remove both containers.
